A Model of Ant Grasping Behaviour

Ants use their antennae as tactile probes to sense their environment, then execute grasps using their mouth-parts on a variety of novel objects. In this work, we define kinematic and motion constraints to create a simplified ant model, which is used to evaluate different hypothetical approaches to tactile probing and grasp synthesis and identify plausible descriptors for real ant behaviour. Using this model, we compare several methods for obtaining tactile data, and for model-free grasp synthesis from this gathered data. We evaluate each combination according to several measures of grasp quality, and the relative cost to execute each behaviour on the robot. The best results are obtained using a PCA-based grasp synthesis method and this is most robust across various shapes if previous contact points influence the selection of future locations to probe.