ArticleThe Journal of experimental biology2022
Robotic communication with ants.
Article in The Journal of experimental biology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Maximal response to a mechanical leader at critical group size in ant collectives.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Stigmergy: from mathematical modelling to control.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Ants combine systematic meandering and correlated random walks when searching for unknown resources.iScience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
We used a robotic gantry to test the hypothesis that tandem running in the ant Temnothorax albipennis can be successful in the absence of trail laying by the leader. Pheromone glands were placed on a pin attached to a gantry. This set-up substituted for the leader of a tandem run. Neither the pin nor the glands touched the substrate and thus the ant following the robot was tracking a plume of airborne pheromones. The robot led individual workers from their current nest to a potential new one. The robotic gantry was programmed to allow for human intervention along its path to permit the following ant to stop and survey its surroundings and then catch up with its mechanical leader. The gantry then automatically tracked the precise route taken by each ant from the new nest back to the old one. Ants led by the robot were significantly more successful at finding their way home than those we carried to the new nest that had no opportunity to learn landmarks. The robot was programmed to take either a straight or a sinusoidal path to the new nest. However, we found no significant difference in the abilities of ants that had been led on such direct or sinuous paths to find their way home. Here, the robot laid no trail but our findings suggest that, under such circumstances, the following ant may lay a trail to substitute for the missing one.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.