This makes it feasible to deploy teams of swarm robots and take advantage of the resulting fault tolerance and parallelism.
[5] In 1991, American electrical engineer James McLurkin was the first to conceptualize the idea of "robot ants" while working at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Through this examination, he could better understand how insects structured their workloads in order to produce a viable and working prototype of robotic ants.
For example, trails coordinate the ant robots via implicit communication and provide an alternative to probabilistic reasoning for solving the simultaneous localization and mapping problem.
Researchers have also developed a theoretical foundation for ant robotics, based on ideas from real-time heuristic search, stochastic analysis and graph theory.