Robotic Ants & Snakes

Earlier this month, at the annual meeting for the Society for Experimental Biology, Markus Knaden of the University of Zurich presented findings that ants use landmarks for navigation with a backup "path integrator" system. This path integrator contually measures the distance traveled and utilizes an internal compass, but is prone to accumulating errors, so the ants have to return to the nest in order to "reset" their bearings.

This research regarding landmark learning and path integration has already been applied in autonomous robots, Knaden says. By incorporating resets of the path integrator at specific locations, the orientation and navigation of the robots can grow even more reliable.

In fields such as biophysics, scientists apply physics to biological systems. Frequently, the inverse is also true and a field of physical science can learn from biology. This happens often in nanotechnology and also in the field of robotics.

Robots have been incorporating applications of biological systems since their creation. In recent years, most practical research in the field has abandoned the android (or human-shaped robot) for insectoid robots or even life-saving snake robots. Instead of creating movement programs from scratch, engineers have focused on creating systems that can mimic the biological process of learning and evolution to create robots that can develop their own internal rules on movement and problem-solving based on trial and error, with appropriate feedback measures.

We may not see a robot like Data (from Star Trek, for the less geeky among us) anytime soon, but with systems like these in place robotics engineering has a definite role in the future.