What is ANTS technology?
ANTS is an acronym for Autonomous Nano-Technology Swarm. ANTS technology builds on and advances recent trends in robotics, artificial intelligence, and materials processing to minimize costs and maximize effectiveness of space operations. The ANTS architecture is inspired by the success of social insect colonies, a success based on the division of labor within the colony in two key ways: First, within their specialties, individual specialists generally outperform generalists. Second, with sufficiently efficient social interaction and coordination, the group of specialists generally outperforms the group of generalists. Thus systems designed as ANTS are built from potentially very large numbers of highly autonomous, yet socially interactive, elements. The architecture is self-similar in that elements and sub-elements of the system may also be recursively structured as ANTS on scales ranging from microscopic to interplanetary distances.
