Ants are simple beings, but when foraging they present complex structures which inspire interesting solutions in this field (Soft Computing)
Marco Dorigo
This is the main reason why Marco Dorigo has devoted his life towards the research work into ‘Ant Colony Optimization and Ant Algorithms‘ since last fifteen years. His work with robots imitating ant activities he has received a prestigious Marie Curie excellence award. 
There are some works that can not be done individually, but with combination of several people, the job becomes quite easier. Ants exhibit a brilliant social structure in terms of foraging. The following figure depicts their behaviour in finding shortest route between food source and their nest. The following is the snapshot of a ground breaking experiment, named ‘Double Bridge Experiment‘ to cultivate the bio inspired behaviour of ants. This demonstrates how they find the right track by tracing pheromone trail density.
Part of the research works of Dorigo is being exploited in the project swarm-bots, where he himself is the coordinator of the entire project. The main idea behind this project is to show that robots can mimic some activities performed by social insects, like ants. These robots are capable of doing jobs by linking up in various ways that a single robot can not perform. Their usefulness and simplicity through hardware and software implementation are their most promising features. 
These robots can be used in disaster management or in space environments, where using human being becomes too risky an operation. In his own lab IRIDIA Marco Dorigo is focusing on swarm intelligence research that involves the highly complicated swarm behaviour in the colony of social insects.
Source: ICT
