ROBOTIC ANTS
Tiny robots are being used to mimic the social behaviours of real ants in order to better understand them. Possible fields of application : The Internet, comunication networks, and transport organisation for companies.
Through very simple behaviours, insect societies are able to accomplish, and so with no external control, extremely complex tasks such as finding the shortest path between two points, or the global organisation of Work within the colony. This phenomenon, called "Swarm Intelligence" still remains some kind of a mystery. To solve the enigma of the "hows and whys" of this phenomenon, searchers at the Toulouse Etology and Animal Psychology Laboratory are now beginning to use minute mobile robots called "Alice". They can measure up to two centimeters, less than an inch, and are armed with infra-red captors which enable them to detect the presence of another robot or of a real insect and to modify their course accordingly. These robots can function as the perfect replica of a real insect colony. And as such, they can help us to understand how a colony works for, contrarily to live insects, these robots can be programmed so as to conduct experiments and verify hypotheses.
This research work in Robotic Etology should raise an interest in all fields of business having to cope with an ever-increasing complexity of information. Indeed, the transfer of billions of bits, as they travel second after second on the Internet, the "real time" accountancy by the banks of thousands of Stock Exchange operations, or the organisation of freight for big transport companies shall in the future surely depend on the knowledge acquired from studying ant colonies.