Ant colonies have been studied for many aspects for thousands of years. As technology progresses, researchers have developed new ways of both gaining insight into the natural lives of ants and understanding how these creatures can benefit humans. One area of ant behavior of particular interest to scientists has always been how ants are able to navigate. In July 2024, a team of researchers led by Professor Guido de Croon from Delft University of Technology published a paper titled Ant Insights Lead to Robot Navigation Breakthrough.

After obtaining a PhD in Artificial Intelligence at Maastricht University in 2008, Guido de Croon joined the team at Delft in the Department of Aerospace Engineering in the Micro Air Vehicle Laboratory. In 2020, the school announced that de Croon had been promoted to a full-time Professor of Bio-Inspired Micro Air Vehicles. One of his first bio-inspired programs at Delft examined how fruit flies could inspire drone technology. “There is still a huge gap between flying animals and drones: A fruit fly is able to fly, avoid obstacles and predators, navigate, find food and shelter, interact socially with other fruit flies and learn from its experiences in the world, all with only 250,000 neurons!

Drones actually often already carry more processing but are by far not yet able to perform all these feats,” Professor de Croon said in the announcement of his new position. “As a full professor I want to work on bridging this gap. Of course, in order to achieve that, we need to focus on a new, bio-inspired approach to AI. But other areas are important as well, such as efficient control techniques and further improving the design of our flapping wing drones. In the end, this will result in swarms of tiny drones that can help in search-and-rescue or can monitor the crop in greenhouses.”

For his latest bio-inspired drone research project, Professor de Croon began studying ants. Some insects, like bees, navigate using the sun and their sense of smell. Ants, however, are visual navigators that take periodic snapshots of their environment while also keeping a mental track of their steps, known as odometry. “Later, when arriving close to the snapshot, the insect can compare its current visual perception to the snapshot and move to minimize the differences. This allows the insect to navigate, or ‘home,’ to the snapshot location, removing any drift that inevitably builds up when only performing odometry,” the team explains in their paper.

Professor de Croon and his students applied this principle to drone navigation systems. He pointed out that for larger drones in unobstructed outdoor environments, relying on GPS is a natural choice. However, for smaller drones in cluttered or indoor environments, GPS would be ineffective. The system adds too much weight to a small drone and only works in outdoor environments free of obstacles. Professor de Croon envisions micro-drones, such as the 56-gram one developed for this project, playing a major role in the future drone industry. They can be used, for example, in swarms to inspect building interiors or underground infrastructure.

But to do this safely, the micro-drones would need to navigate autonomously without cumbersome GPS systems. The team flew a drone through a designated area while it took snapshots of the environment, similar to how an ant would take snapshots as it forages. The snapshots are then uploaded to a small SIM card in the drone, along with its virtually weightless odometer. “The main insight underlying our strategy is that you can space snapshots much further apart, if the robot travels between snapshots based on odometry.” Professor de Croon said. “Homing will work as long as the robot ends up close enough to the snapshot location, i.e., as long as the robot’s odometry drift falls within the snapshot’s catchment area. This also allows the robot to travel much further, as the robot flies much slower when homing to a snapshot than when flying from one snapshot to the next based on odometry.”

The system is less advanced than the state-of-the-art navigation systems used in most drones today; however, therein lies its beauty. “For many applications, this may be more than enough. For instance, for stock tracking in warehouses or crop monitoring in greenhouses, drones could fly out, gather data, and then return to the base station,” Professor de Croon says. Though it is an overstatement to say that ant navigation is simple, this pared-down bio-inspired navigational system could be the next step in autonomous micro-drone swarm navigation.

Previous Drone News: