Terrence and I have been brainstorming about ideas for the midterm, and we have settled on creating a robotic concept which mimics ants’ relationship with food. We were inspired by the concept of often seeing ants feasting together around a large piece of food, namely sugary things. Our rough goal is to create an environment where one ant discovers food and goes to grab it. Then, another ant’s senses are set off and he follows the first ant to the source. They then share their findings together, as ants normally do.
We started off by doing research about how ants sense food, namely sugar. We learned that ants usually smell it from a distance, as they are equipped with good sense of smell. And those special species that cannot smell from a distance actually “smell” by touching, which is called chemoreception.
The initial process of finding sugar in an ant colony is as follows.
- First, an ant colony would send out “scouts” to find food in different directions with a radius of 100-200 meters. Once it smells the sugar, the search ends. They possess something called “sensilia” which has something called “glomeruli”. The more glomeruli an ant has, the better it can process and sense smells.
- Once the ant finds food, the scout grabs a small sample of it and proceeds to return back to the colony, taking the shortest route possible. Along this route, it leaves a trail of pheremones. When it arrives back at the colony with the sample, other ants observe the sample and use the same path the ant set to go to the source of food. The more ants go back and forth on the path, the stronger the pheromone trail gets, which makes it easier for other ants to detect them.
Terrence and I intend to mimic this process with robots, by using “Robot A” as the scout. “Robot B” will be the first ant out of the swarm which detects the pheromone path and follows along to the food source.