Ants are amazing. They are tiny machines with tiny brains that nevertheless work together to achieve very complex goals. They employ a variety of specialized forms for different tasks and exploit favorable scaling laws to move around in, and manipulate objects in, their environment.

We are performing research to provide the core fundamental knowledge needed to realize artificial ants: how to embed communication, computation, and actuation in a very small form factor to create adaptable, coordinated behavior in robots on a size scale that has not previously been realized. The ultra-small size of these systems absolutely requires co-development of the computational and physical components, which will be severely size and power constrained.

Introduction

This is an inter-disciplinary project headed by four  faculty members from the ECE and ME departments at the University of Maryland, College Park. Even though the work is done throughout the Clark School facilities, our home base is the CPS & Cooperative Autonomy Laboratory located in the Institute for Systems Research at 2158 A.V. Williams Building. This is an NSF-funded project.

Our project has been featured in the Spring 2011 edition of the E&M magazine published by the School of Engineering!

Click here to download a pdf file of the magazine, and here to access the E&M website.

TinyTerps with tank base in Action!