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TEAMS of mindless robots can achieve complex tasks without communicating with
each other, say robotics experts in Canada, who were inspired by ants鈥�
behaviour. Armies of such cheap, expendable robots might one day help build a
base on Mars鈥攐r simply mow your lawn.

Non-communicative behaviour in ants is observed when they combine their
efforts to carry large pieces of food, such as leaves, says Ronald Kube, a
robotics expert at the Edmonton Research Park in Alberta. He says he has now
mimicked the same sort of distributed intelligence in a gang of worker
robots.

If you watch a particular ant, its behaviour seems chaotic and sometimes
counterproductive, says Kube. But the 鈥渢eam鈥� as a whole displays a form of
intelligence despite the lack of central control.

This is attractive to people who build robots because such distributed
systems tend to be very robust. It is a lot cheaper and easier to build a large
number of simple robots than build one expensive complex robot to do the same
job. A centrally controlled system can be brought down by a single failure. 鈥淏ut
who cares if I lose two or three hundred of these, as long as the job gets
done?鈥� asks Kube.

His challenge was to find a job in which some robots could be lost without
preventing the task being completed. 鈥淲e had to pick a problem that was hard
enough that it couldn鈥檛 be carried out by a single robot,鈥� says Kube, who worked
on the project with Eric Bonabeau, then at the Santa Fe Institute in New
Mexico.

The team鈥檚 six robots are intrinsically stupid, says Kube. Their mission is
to search an arena for food, which in this case is a light source on a box. The
box is too heavy for a single robot to push. Once they reach the food source,
each robot has to establish if it is facing a second light on the ceiling at the
other end of the arena, which represents the nest. If they are, they try to push
the food to the nest. If not, then they wander around in a counterclockwise
fashion until they find the food again and then re-evaluate whether or not to
push.

Although the behaviour of individuals appears chaotic (see the videos at
www.cs.ualberta.ca/~kube/crip.cgi), the robots accomplish their task using only the
position of the box as the means of indirect communication. Eliminating the need
for robots to communicate gets rid of the thorny and hardware-hungry problem of
orchestrating their messaging.

Chris Melhuish, a robot expert at the University of West England in Bristol,
says finding the simple rules that produce this kind of behaviour is
tricky鈥攂ut by mimicking nature, at least we know these rules exist.