Cooperative Transport By Ants and Robots

C. Ronald Kube and Eric Bonabeau

Working Papers from Santa Fe Institute

Abstract: In several species of ants, workers cooperate to retrieve large prey. Usually, one ant finds a prey item, tries to move it, and, when unsucessful for some time, recuits nestmates through direct contact or chemical marking. When a group of ants tries to move large prey, the ants change position and alignment until the prey can be moved toward the nest. A robotic implementation of this phenomenon is described. Although the robotic system may not appear to be very efficient, it is an interesting example of decentralized problem-solving by a group of robots, and it provides the first formalized model of cooperative transport in ants.

Published in Robotics and Autonomous Systems30 (2000), 85-101.

Keywords: Ants; cooperative transport; robotics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wop:safiwp:99-01-008

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Santa Fe Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Krichel ().