Communications of the ACM
Houston, We Have Ants: Mimicking How Ants Adjust to Microgravity in Space Could Lead to Better Robots, Stanford Scientist Says
Sending 600 ants to the International Space Station is part of an experiment that could help predict how searching robots might respond to difficult situations.
Credit: NASA
Stanford University professor Deborah Gordon has designed an experiment involving sending 600 ants to the International Space Station to determine how they change the innate algorithms that modulate their group behavior in an exotic environment. The data obtained through the experiment could help predict how other groups, such as searching robots, would respond to difficult situations.
Ants communicate primarily by contacting each other by smell and touching antennae. If antennae-to-antennae interactions occur frequently, the ants sense that the area is densely populated, and they circle around in small, random paths to gather information about their surroundings. If the antennae-to-antennae interaction frequency is low, the ants walk in straighter lines, giving up thoroughness in favor of covering more ground, in a technique known as an expandable search network.
In the space experiment, 70 ants were released into each of several small arenas that were divided into three sections; the researchers used cameras to track the ants' searching patterns as the barriers were lowered, increasing the search area and decreasing the density of ants in the arena.
Studying how the ants modified their search behavior when the loss of gravity interfered with their interactions could inform researchers how to design similar flexible protocols for robots and other devices that rely on expandable search networks.
From Stanford University
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