The team built the robot to mimic the behaviour of rock ants that use one-to-one tuition, in which an ant that has discovered a much better new nest can teach the route there to another individual.

The findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology today, confirm that most of the important elements of teaching in these ants are now understood because the teaching ant can be replaced by a machine.

Key to this process of teaching is tandem running where one ant literally leads another ant quite slowly along a route to the new nest. The pupil ant learns the route sufficiently well that it can find its own way back home and then lead a tandem-run with another ant to the new nest, and so on.

Read the full University of Bristol article

Paper: ‘Robotic communication with ants’ by Nigel R. Franks, Jacob A. Podesta,  Edward C. Jarvis, Alan Worley and Ana B. Sendova-Franks in the Journal of Experimental Biology.