Experimental Study and Modeling of Group Retrieval in Ants as an Approach to Collective Transport in Swarm Robotic Systems

Group food retrieval in some ant species serves as a useful paradigm for multirobot collective transport strategies that are decentralized, scalable, and do not require a priori information about the payload. We present a comprehensive overview of group retrieval in ants and investigate this phenomenon in Aphaenogaster cockerelli in order to extract the ants´ roles during transport, the rules that govern their actions, and the individual forces that they apply to guide a food item to their nest. To measure these forces, we fabricated elastic structures with calibrated stiffness properties, induced ants to retrieve the structures, and tracked the resulting deformations with a camera. We then developed a hybrid system model of the ant behaviors that were observed in the experiments. We conducted simulations of the behavioral model that incorporate a quasi-static model of planar manipulation with compliant attachment points. Our simulations qualitatively replicate individual ant activity as well as certain macroscopic features of the transport.