https://www.npr.org/2023/11/21/1214246291/army-ants-architecture-science-robots-research

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Army ants use collective intelligence to build bridges. Robots can
learn from it As army ants travel over uneven terrain, they link
their bodies together to create bridges -- a system that might give
engineers insight into controlling robotic swarms.

Animals

Army ants use collective intelligence to build bridges. Robots could
learn from them

November 21, 20235:00 AM ET

By 

Kai McNamee

Army ants use collective intelligence to build bridges. Robots could
learn from them

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[eciton_ham]
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When army ants encounter obstacles, they link together to build
living bridges. Isabella Muratore hide caption

toggle caption
Isabella Muratore

When army ants encounter obstacles, they link together to build
living bridges.

Isabella Muratore

Studying army ants for a living comes with certain occupational
hazards.

"They're very aggressive," says Isabella Muratore at the New Jersey
Institute of Technology. "They have venom, so they will sting you and
they will bite you. It's not that bad. It's just that you're usually
getting stung by hundreds of them at once."

The ants are fierce predators, devouring other insects - sometimes
even frogs, lizards and birds. But what's even more remarkable about
them is their architectural prowess.

Muratore has been studying how army ants build bridges by linking
their bodies, which could give scientists insights into controlling
swarms of robots. She presented her work at a meeting of the
Entomological Society of America in early November.

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Commonly found in Central America, South America and Africa, the ants
scour forest floors in long foraging lines.

When they encounter obstacles - like a gap between leaves or branches
- they build a bridge, linking themselves together like a barrel of
monkeys.

"The workers will string themselves across that gap, and then other
workers will walk on top of them," Muratore told NPR. "Basically,
they create shortcuts to make things easier for the other ants or
just to allow them to traverse something that they otherwise
couldn't."

[pxl_202304]
Enlarge this image

Biologist Isabella Muratore is studying how the ants optimize their
bridge building to find the most efficient paths around obstacles.
Isabella Muratore hide caption

toggle caption
Isabella Muratore

Biologist Isabella Muratore is studying how the ants optimize their
bridge building to find the most efficient paths around obstacles.

Isabella Muratore

Instead of taking a convoluted path around an obstacle, she says, the
ants make their hunts more efficient, allowing them to collect more
food.

But building bridges comes at a cost to the colony: the ants occupied
with supporting the bridge aren't available to hunt.

Despite individually having small brains, the ants collectively weigh
the costs and benefits of a bridge, Muratore said.

Muratore studied the ants' decision-making by deliberately placing
obstacles in their way as they navigated the forest. She filmed them,
then analyzed the ant traffic.

She says the ants build bridges where they get the greatest benefit
for the least amount of bodies - and she identified a sweet spot
where the gap is large enough to justify building a bridge, but not
so large that it takes too many ants to do so. She also found that a
string of bridges can influence how much ant power the ants are
willing to invest in each individual bridge.

[pxl_202202]
Enlarge this image

Muratore studied the ants by placing obstacles in their path, then
filming them and analyzing the traffic. Isabella Muratore hide
caption

toggle caption
Isabella Muratore

Muratore studied the ants by placing obstacles in their path, then
filming them and analyzing the traffic.

Isabella Muratore

"Just like people, we don't just build one bridge, we have to decide:
'How is this whole road going to look like across many different
obstacles?'" says David Hu, a professor of engineering at the Georgia
Institute of Technology, who has extensively studied how fire ants
build rafts to survive flooding.

Hu says this type of research is shedding new light on the collective
intelligence of army ants. He compares the individual ants to
"neurons in a big moving brain," with no singular ant deciding where
to build bridges.

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The collective decision making of ants also has implications for
human technology. Engineers have already applied swarm behaviors
learned from ant research to building algorithms for self-assembling
robots.

"It was the grand challenge of robotics for a long time to take a
bucket of robot parts and dump it out and have that robot be able to
piece itself together and solve sort of bigger problems," Hu said.

"Ants are kind of existence proof that such a robot would actually be
able to survive and have a lot of interesting problems to solve in
the real world," Hu said. "[Ants are] really capable at solving these
things with really, really little brainpower."

  * ant architecture
  * army ants
  * science
  * robots

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