Bio-inspired Robotics

Introduction:

Our approach is characterized with a strong inclination for biological inspiration in which examples in nature — social insects in particular — are used as a way of designing strategies for controlling mobile robots. This approach has been successfully applied to the study of task, namely, Ant’s algorithms used in computer networks for routing data between Routers.
This phenomenon found in ants to derive the necessary behaviors for accomplishing this task. We study a species of ant known to possess this capability.

“bio-Computing” is a way “to understand how the relation of brain, body and environment produce behavior, to clarify the essential problems posed, and to devise and test hypotheses under realistic conditions” social insects were capable of successfully navigating and acting in the face of uncertain and unpredictable environments. It was reasoned that if a single robot required complex systems and techniques in order to perform in a reliable manner, then perhaps intelligent systems could be designed with many “simpler” robots using a minimalist approach to sensing and actuation; where group behavior is an emergent property and control is decentralized. Could system reliability be achieved by trading complexity for redundancy coupled with ”randomness” used to explore possible solution paths, which are often traits found in social insect colonies? May be, biology can teach us a thing or two about engineering swarms of simple interacting robots, and the theoretical foundations developed to model and explain these behaviors found in insect colonies can be used to underpin a more rigorous approach to collective robot design. Nature has already demonstrated the feasibility of this approach by way of the social insects.