Robotic Ants May Aid in Search and Rescue Missions 

In the unfortunate event that miners become trapped underground or people are pinned beneath the rubble of a building, we currently look to search and rescue volunteers, dogs, and vehicles to race against the clock to save lives.

But plowing through unstable rubble often puts volunteers at risk, which has led researchers to look to robots to ensure the safety and success of future search and rescue operations.

Daniel Goldman, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is looking into ways that fire ants may one day come to our rescue, or more to the point—robotic fire ants.

Goldman explained, “The dream and goal in this field is to turn a robot into a multifunctional device capable of moving everywhere.  We’re seeking inspiration for how teams of little robots could self-organize to create structures that allow them to efficiently and effectively move around in nasty environments.”

Goldman and some of his colleagues decided to study fire ants to see how they navigated in confined underground environments.  He and his team collected thousands of these ants and placed them in containers filled with soil-mimicking materials that contained different moisture levels and particle diameters. 

Ultimately, Goldman hopes that they can take what they learn from the fire ants' underground navigation skills and apply them to search and rescue robots. But for the time being, the focus is on observation.

The ants were continuously monitored with high-speed video tracking equipment as well as X-ray computed tomography that was able to look into the 3-dimensional tunnels.  

What they found was that the ants’ excavations varied in length and direction based on the different soil types and moisture levels.  However, the tunnel diameter always stayed the same.  The researchers believe that the ants engineer their tunnels this way so that they can optimize movement and reduce the need for complex neural processing. 

The researchers did a second experiment, in which they placed the ants in glass tubes of different diameters.  Occasionally, they would shoot an air piston that would shake the tubes, causing the ants to loose their footing.  The ants were able to use their antennae to grip the sides of the tubes and steady themselves.  However, in the tubes with bigger diameters, the ants had a harder time stabilizing themselves. 

Due to the high-speed camera used to study the ants, the researchers found that ants actually trip in their own tunnels and will use their antennae and limbs to brace themselves.  Their channels have a persistent diameter so that they can recuperate from these slips quickly. 

The team thinks that with these findings robots can be created that have similar principles applied.  “Organisms have solved lots of interesting problems of how to move around in the natural environment,” Goldman says.  If all goes well, he states, in future disaster zones we could have multitudes of mechanical ants or “little robots that look like cockroaches that will swarm all over the place.”

Full story at Txchnologist.