Robot Fire Ants Could Help Trapped Victims in Search and Rescue Missions

Fire ants have long plagued southern states such as Texas, Georgia and Mississippi. With their painful stings and aggressive behavior, these ants are insects you don't want to mess with. Now, though, researchers have found out a way to utilize this invasive species. They're studying the creatures' tunneling behavior in order to potentially create search-and-rescue robots that could help trapped victims.

Fire ants have a unique way of moving through their tunnels beneath the surface of the Earth. The tunnels themselves can stretch as much as six feet beneath the Earth, yet fire ants can quickly evacuate the nest when tunnels become flooded due to seasonal rains. That's no small task considering that the tunnels can run vertically.

In order to track these ants and examine their ability to move through their subterranean homes, researchers placed the ants in glass tubes and artificial soil. They then watched the ants move through these different mediums, examining how exactly they were able to combat gravity itself.

It turns out that ants had one special way to navigate these different tunnels. Like a monkey uses its tail, the ant used its antennae as an extra set of limbs. The researchers watched as the fire ants used a wide-legged or bent-legged posture depending on the size of the tunnel and then used its antennae to stop itself from falling when it lost its grip. In fact, the climbing technique was so effective that the fire ants were able to move just as quickly in narrow tunnels as wide tunnels.

Now that the scientists have examined exactly how these fire ants move, the hard part will be applying that movement to robots.

"The characteristics of the animals and response of the (robot) sensors are typically so different that it is problematic to just copy what you see in their behavior to run it on the robot," said Achim Lilienthal, director of the Mobile Robot and Olfaction Laboratory at the University of Orebro in Sweden, in an interview with NBC News.

Yet feats like these aren't impossible. Researchers have looked to nature in the past in order to create robots that mimic bat flight and armored plates that mimicked the plates on a seahorse. In this case, the researchers could design robots that can locate people trapped underground.

The details of the ants' movements are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.