Festo Bionic Learning Network (Germany) BionicANTs (1)

Not for saleResearch demonstrator. Festo's technical brochure is dated April 2015.

Not for sale (research)Robot ant swarmPiezo legsStereo camera105 g

Not for saleShipping: Not for sale. Never sold. One has been exhibited at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Festo brochure (archived) ↗Wevolver specs ↗

Overview

Palm-sized robot ants that Festo used to show cooperative behaviour. Each ant follows a shared set of rules and talks to the others by radio, so a group can push and carry objects that one ant could not move alone. The legs use piezo-ceramic bending actuators instead of motors, and the circuitry is printed straight onto the laser-sintered body with 3D-MID technology. The ants run for up to 40 minutes, then dock with a charging station through their feelers. Like BionicKangaroo and eMotionButterflies, it was a showcase project, not a product.

Specifications

Category	Multi-legged robots · Research & legacy
Released	2015
Country	Germany
Availability	Not for sale (research)
Programmability	No programmability
Best for	Professionals & labs
Vision sensors	Depth camera, Camera
Actuators	Other
Audio	No audio
Compute type	Arduino / ESP32 / microcontroller
Compute	ARM Cortex-M4 processor on 3D-MID circuit tracks moulded onto the body, JNtec radio module
Weight	105 g (135 mm long, 150 mm wide, 43 mm high)
Speed	Not published (10 mm step size)
Legs / DOF	6 legs driven by 18 trimorphic piezo-ceramic bending transducers, plus 2 more in the gripper jaws
Sensors	3D stereo camera in the head (from TU Delft's MAV lab), Avago ADNS-2080 optical floor sensor, feelers that double as charging contacts
SDK	None public