Social insects like ants and bees exhibit sophisticated collective intelligence through problem solving. For example, ants use pheromone trails to mark routes to food sources, with more traveled paths attracting more ants over time. The problems social insects solve, such as finding food and building nests, relate to engineering and computer science issues. Swarm intelligence takes inspiration from social insects by combining many simple robots to achieve complex behaviors, with potential applications including military operations, health, manufacturing, and space exploration. For instance, exploring the solar system may require deploying many small robots that can replicate themselves and build new vehicles.
2. Social insects, such as ants, bees, termites, and wasps, have very
powerful problem solving skills with sophisticated collective
intelligence.
For instance, ants use pheromone trails to mark the routes they use to
find food.
Social insects
3. Social insects / Ants
more
traveled
trails
less
traveled
paths
Attract new ants
Ants evaporate
eventually
4. The problems social insects solve finding food, dividing labor among
nest mates , building nests, responding to external challenges have
important counterparts in engineering and computer science.
Swarm intelligence , inspired by the observation of these social insects,
attempts to mimic the highly efficient behavior of social insects by
combining hundreds or even thousands of relatively simple robots to
generate behavior more complex than any individual device could
achieve alone.
social insects & Swarm intelligence
5. A branch of artificial intelligence.
Has many potential application areas, including the military ,
surveillance and monitoring, health, micro manufacturing ,and space
exploration.
For instance, maybe the only way for explore the solar system and
beyond is to build vast numbers of small robots that will be able to land
on planetary bodies.
Then they might build copies of themselves as well as new vehicles,
eventually generating millions of robots spread throughout the galaxy.
swarm intelligence