3.3.2 AUTONOMOUS NANOTECHNOLOGY SWARMS
NASA’s autonomous nanotechnology swarms (ANTS) creates communities of intelligent teams of agents where redundancy is built in. The ANTS architecture uses a biologically inspired approach, with ants as primary inspiration. It is the most sophisticated of all of the stigmergic systems currently in design. Swarms of up to
1000 nodes will be deployed on deep space missions to study asteroids, with subswarms of 100 nodes being independently tasked with given mission parameters.Several classes of swarm unit have been defined with measurement (imaging, for example), communication and leadership characteristics. A generic worker class has also been designed. The ANTS project timeline extends beyond 2030 when the first missions are envisaged. However, several important engineering concepts have already been developed. In the ANTS system, the basic physical structure is a tetrahedron that flexes, changing shape causing a tumbling motion thereby allowing movement over a surface. Tetrahedral structures are used at all levels of the ANTS design, the designers arguing that this structure is one of the most stable naturallyoccurring structures. The ANTS system consists of small, spatially distributed units of autonomous, redundant components. These components exhibit high plasticity and are organized as hierarchical (multilevel, dense heterarchy) and inspired by the
success of social insect colonies. The ANTS system uses hybrid reasoning – symbolic and neural network systems – for achieving high levels of autonomous decision making.