Human movers carrying, say, a couch up a stairway might handle such a problem by talking each other through the task. But ants communicate through the object they're carrying. Instead, if the item needs realignment, ants will sense that and reinforce the weak side. The same idea has now been applied to robots that are designed to move large boxes. The robots are able to manipulate boxes and move them efficiently without actually communicating with one another.
Ants find the fastest routes between food and home base using chemicals called pheromones.
Although Bonabeau is a biologist as well as an engineer, he stresses that his main interest lies in finding solutions in nature while not necessarily understanding exactly how nature works. One of his ant swarm models, for example, is based on a system that he isn't sure actually exists in ant colonies. Instead, he drew from what he knows about ant swarms and devised a system that could theoretically work in an ant colony. What we care about is taking what we know about species like ants and creating efficient systems. Eamon Mallon, a researcher at the Ant Lab at the University of Bath in England says that Bonabeau's approach is understandable, considering how difficult it is to observe ant swarms carefully.