Northern Exposure 2009: ANTS
257 views · Published 2 July 2009 · 0:09 · Indexed 20 September 2026
Channel: DRLibby · 2009 · Education
Close up of Ants... ANTS - Autonomous Nano-Technology Swarm - a NASA mission that will launch sometime between 2020 and 2030 A cutting edge research team are exploring ways to enable telecommunications and computing networks to become self-healing. ANTS - The Autonomic NanoTechnology Swarm (ANTS) is a generic mission architecture consisting of miniaturized, autonomous, self-similar, reconfigurable, addressable components forming structures. The components/structures have wide spatial distribution and multi-level organization. This swarm behavior is inspired by the success of social insect colonies where within their specialties, individuals outperform generalists and with sufficiently efficient social interaction and coordination, groups of specialists outperform groups of generalists. http://ants.gsfc.nasa.gov/ArchandAI.html The mission is viewed as the prototype for how many future unmanned NASA missions will be developed and how future space exploration will exploit autonomous and autonomic behaviour.
