Germany-based automation company Festo is making bionic ants. These are artificial ant units that move together under clear rules. They are showing off their cooperative behavior for doing tasks and working as an overall networked system. The company named their creations BionicANTs, to also stand for Autonomous Networking Technologies. The company sees them suitable as development platforms for new technologies and production methods.
BionicANTs – cooperation based on the behaviour of ants
The technology carrier BionicANTs uses the cooperative behaviour of ants as a model. Engineers from Festo used complex regulation algorithms to transfer the behaviour of these insects to the world of technology: just like their models from nature, the BionicANTs cooperate in accordance with clearly defined rules. This enables the BionicANTs to react autonomously to different situations as individual units, to coordinate their behaviour with each other and to act as a networked overall system. By pushing and pulling in a coordinated manner, they shift loads that one ant could not move alone. All actions are based on a distributed catalogue of rules that was devised in advance by means of mathematical model-building and simulations and is programmed into each ant. The individual insects are thus able to make decisions autonomously, while nevertheless subordinating themselves to the common aim; each ant thus contributes its share to solving the task at hand.
The required exchange of information between the ants is effected via the radio modules in their torsos. The regulation strategy comprises a multi-agent system, in which the participants have equal rights. With the 3D stereo camera in their heads, the ants recognise an object to be grasped and can determine their own locations. The BionicANTs’ cooperative behaviour and decentralised intelligence open up interesting prospects for the factory of tomorrow. Future production systems will be based on intelligent components that can flexibly adapt to different production scenarios and process orders from the superordinate control level.
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BionicANTs – cooperation based on the behaviour of ants
The technology carrier BionicANTs uses the cooperative behaviour of ants as a model. Engineers from Festo used complex regulation algorithms to transfer the behaviour of these insects to the world of technology: just like their models from nature, the BionicANTs cooperate in accordance with clearly defined rules. This enables the BionicANTs to react autonomously to different situations as individual units, to coordinate their behaviour with each other and to act as a networked overall system. By pushing and pulling in a coordinated manner, they shift loads that one ant could not move alone. All actions are based on a distributed catalogue of rules that was devised in advance by means of mathematical model-building and simulations and is programmed into each ant. The individual insects are thus able to make decisions autonomously, while nevertheless subordinating themselves to the common aim; each ant thus contributes its share to solving the task at hand.
The required exchange of information between the ants is effected via the radio modules in their torsos. The regulation strategy comprises a multi-agent system, in which the participants have equal rights. With the 3D stereo camera in their heads, the ants recognise an object to be grasped and can determine their own locations. The BionicANTs’ cooperative behaviour and decentralised intelligence open up interesting prospects for the factory of tomorrow. Future production systems will be based on intelligent components that can flexibly adapt to different production scenarios and process orders from the superordinate control level.
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