Ant Locomotion Studies Could Improve Underground Search and Rescue Robots
By studying fire ants in the lab using video tracking equipment and X-ray computed tomography, Georgia Tech researchers have discovered basic principles of locomotion that robot teams could use to travel more efficiently through underground tunnels. "The problems that the ants face are the same kinds of problems that a digging robot working in a confined space would potentially face – the need for rapid movement, stability, and safety – all with limited sensing and brain power," said biology professor Michael Goodisman. Among the newly uncovered principles is building tunnel environments that assist in moving around by limiting slips and falls, and by reducing the need for complex neural processing. In the researchers' studies, groups of ants were placed into tubes of soil and allowed to dig tunnels for 20 hours. Regardless of the variations in particle size and moisture content, the diameters of the ants' tunnels remained constant.
Transcript
00:00:03 our group is uh broadly interested in questions of interaction of biological and robotic systems with uh complex natural environments fire ants are of course a nasty invasive species and that's why a lot of people first started studying them and so their biology is extremely well known and for that reason we became interested in studying how they move around in the ground the first
00:00:25 thing we studied we learned about how the animals dig nests within the ground the nest consist of tunnels and little Chambers and we were able to visualize these using laboratory apparatus which allows us to track the movement of ants and the movement of the uh the growth of the tunnels over time we noticed that while the amount of soil the animals could excavate uh changed the diameter
00:00:49 of the vertical tunnels that they created in the first few hours of their uh digging Behavior Uh remained independent of the soil type for me one of the most surprising things that we found was the way that the these ants are using their antenni so antenni have typically been thought just to be sensory appendages but I was stunned when I saw them sort of tumbling through
00:01:07 these tubes and catching themselves using their antenna using them as extra limbs Nick gravish was a PhD student in our group was the student who really pioneered the techniques that are reported in this paper and we placed ants and S and a soil between two glass planes to basically make a kind of scientific gr ant farm and over a period of hours we watched as the ants
00:01:30 excavated tunnels Within These uh scientific ant farms we were able to visualize the so-called kinematics of the movement of the ants and observe how they use their limbs and different body parts including antenna to move rapidly uh within the tunnels the final aspect of the study was that uh we wanted to understand uh the how the ants create uh tunnels not just in a sort of scientific
00:01:57 Ant Farm but in a more natural environment so Nick gravish along with a postto in our group Dr Daria Mona and kova uh created a homemade x-ray computed tomography system which allowed us to peer into the soil in cylindrical uh containers and allowed us to actually visualize the networks of tunnels that the ants created in three dimensions and we found that the tunnels they created
00:02:22 in three dimensions had comparable diameters to those we found in our scientific ant farms so we think that these findings could be very useful for roboticist in particular the ants are telling us about problems they face when they're moving around underground that they're frequently slipping that they're they may have trouble grasping on to the sides of walls Etc and so you can
00:02:40 imagine that if you want to build an underground digging robot in the future these are things that the roboticist would have to consider and maybe build into their robot how do how does a robot catch itself if it slips how can it move up and down tunnels easily how can it dig these are all things that the ants are telling us about