I-SWARM For Kids

When you look into the nature, you surely observed ants which are living in a big state – an ant-hill. Isn't it amazing how these small animals are organising themselves, helping each other to survive, to fight against enemies and support their breed? And – If you look to one single ant, it is a fully independent living being. Not complicated at the first sight, but at the second sight you see tiny hairs which are sensing touch and temperature, feelers for communicating to each other, some kind of nose needed for path finding and eyes for observing their environment. Finally, the ant is equipped with a weapon that squirt formic acid needed to fight enemies or to kill intruders.

But – one or two ants are not able to survive. They would die within several hours, because their living depend on many other ants. This is called a swarm: many individuals are close together to solve their daily problems, helping each other in every case of problems. Finally, they give their lives for others to survive.

As you know, we humans always look into the nature to learn a lot of things for problems we cannot solve all alone. For example, the skin of a shark has many advantages regarding it's flow resistance in the water – useful for building ships not needing as much energy as other ships. The same is true when we want to design and build tiny robots. We look into the nature and watch small animals – insects in this case – and learn how they walk, fight, eat and so on. And then we try to copy these animals as good as we can. This is needed for building artificial ants.

If it is possible to design such a swarm of artificial ants, we could use them to clean surfaces like windows, let them help to fight against diseases and examine living cells in laboratories. This would be a great step into the future, because they can solve problems that man can't solve today. They will help to get a cleaner environment and make it possible to put medical products on a higher level.

So, if you like, take a closer look and find out, if it is possible to create small robots which have the same behaviour as ants have. If you read the following small chapters, you can learn a lot how we try to build such small robots, and how far scientists are in this really amazing part of technology.