If you want to see the unfettered power of cooperation, you need look no further than colonial insects. In the 1998 DreamWorks Animation film Antz we follow Z, an ant who is tired of working for the benefit of the colony and wants to chart his own path outside of his prescribed fate.
The movie made some social commentary about the potential dangers of conformity while ultimately coming back around to the power of cooperation. When Mandible, the film’s villain, tricks the colony into building a super tunnel leading to a puddle, in an attempt to assassinate the queen in a violent coup, the colony teams up to build a bridge to the surface.
That bridge-building ability is a real world behavior in some ants, and stands to show the way that ants or other swarming animals work together to accomplish incredible feats that are greater than the sum of their parts. Engineers have been working for years to craft robots with the same cooperative swarming abilities. They’ve succeeded, to a degree. While swarming behaviors have been established in macro-scale robots, it has remained a challenge in smaller machines. That’s unfortunate because micro or nano robots are necessarily capable of doing less work. They would most benefit from working together
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