Just call these tiny autonomous construction robots “antdroids”

Roboticists at Harvard and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras – very smart folks indeed – somehow entirely missed the great name “antdroids” when building the insectoid drones they call RAnts (robotic ants, which do not, in fact, rant about anything – not even against a tyrannical robotic ant queen).

But since their goal was understanding adaptive group behavior emerging from how a swarm of simple entities interact with each other and their environment (rather than clever wordplay), the success of their experiment in emergent coordination and “exbodied intelligence” illuminates exciting futures in understanding animal behavior, autonomous construction in dangerous locales, and even exploration or construction on extraterrestrial bodies including planets, asteroids, and comets.

In a paper that was recently published in the journal PRX Life, Fabio Giardina and L. Mahadevan at Harvard, and S. Ganga Prasath at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras describe how – as one can see in the following video – their RAnts required no central control to coordinate demolishing or building simple structures (differing from previous Harvard research in which ant-inspired robots merely escaped a “jail”).

Instead, the RAnts’ coordination arose from researchers adjusting only two Rant parameters (strength of cooperation, and rate of depositing or removing building blocks when signal thresholds were met) at sites where the RAnts clustered around markers they’d left on the floor of their experimental environment. The more RAnts gathering, the more construction or demolition they perform.

When creatures such as ants, termites, bees, and wasps collectively assemble complex, climate-controlled structures for reproduction, habitation, and food storage, they’re demonstrating what the authors call “decentralized spatiotemporal signals in a dynamical environment,” signals which change insect behavior and are changed by that behavior. And, remarkably, non-biological entities such as the RAnts, operating as a robot collective, spontaneously do the same when they coordinate assembling or disassembling structures.

So, what does “exbodied intelligence” actually mean? As Mahadevan explains, it’s “collective cognition” arising not just from a group of entities, but from “their ongoing interaction with an evolving environment,” adding that his team’s research “shows how simple, local rules can lead to the emergence of complex task completion that is self-organized and thus robust and adaptive.” Another term for that self-organization is stigmergy (stigma = mark + ergon = work), which emphasizes how working entities leave signs in their environment that influence what their swarm-mates do next.

Biomimicry is a significant driver in robot design; New Atlas has previously reported on insectobots that imitate water striders or fly massive distances with specially designed wings, bee-bots with legs like those of crane flies, and mass-production of cyborg cockroaches.

Like ants, RAnts are too small to possess human-level cognition and memory, so if they’re going to achieve complex goals, they need to out-source, or exbody, their data-processing to their environment. Whereas some actual insects use pheromones as biochemical markers (or stigmergic traces), the RAnts biomimicked version is photormones – light signals – to guide the actions of their collective.

If humans are ever to live in habitats on the Moon, Mars, or elsewhere, autonomous construction before human arrival arrive will be an indispensable means to reduce enormous costs and dangers from building where radiation, lack of breathable (or any) atmosphere, and extreme temperatures are perfect for slaughtering us as if we were, well, ants.

While some of those automatons may be mobile 3D printers the size of rovers, or as large as the GITAI mechs building 16.5-foot (5-m) high communication towers in this video, some may be as small as vacuum cleaners, as mice, or, perhaps one day, as small as the humble RAnt.

Source: Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences