New Self-Steering Vehicle Designed to Mimic Movements of Ants
AlphaGalileo (09/17/08)

The way that ants find the shortest
distance to their anthill or sources of food is serving as the model for keeping
a self-steering vehicle on the correct path along a road. Engineers from the
University of La Laguna (ULL) in the Canary Islands have developed a new
algorithm, called Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), to resolve "problems of
combinatory optimization" to help a driverless vehicle sense road surfaces. Ants
leave a trail of pheromones as they move, which other members of the colony
smell and follow. "The ACO technique is based, similarly, on a colony of
artificial ants, in other words computational agents that work cooperatively and
communicate with each other by means of artificial pheromone trails," says ULL's
Rafael Arnay. The team is developing Verdino, a prototype driverless vehicle
that uses a camera to gather visual data to apply the algorithms and an internal
control system to process the data in real time. Verdino is being tested as an
internal transpo rt system for a housing development, and the team believes such
a self-guided system could be used at tourist attractions, sporting venues,
shopping centers, and also as part of remote security systems.
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