It turns out that besides being excellent at stealing crumbs off your kitchen counter, ants are also impeccable groomers, and their self-cleaning habits might be the key to designing biomechanical cleaning devices in nanotech.
In a video narrated by Alexander Hackmann, a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology, Hackmann explained the importance of keeping the vital antennae – which ants use to to seek out potential mates, and to identify enemies – free of contaminants. He also indicated the fine and sophisticated intricacies of the grooming structures found on the forelegs, which ants use to self-clean.
"The cleaning structure consists of three different zones: the bristles and the comb remove the largest particles mechanically. Smaller contaminants that make it through these first two filtering steps then adhere to the brush hairs," Hackmann extrapolated
So how does this tie in with nanotechnology? Essentially, nanobots can be pretty fragile, and it they're not cleaned regularly, they could break down or go haywire. The efficient cleaning habits of ants can possibly serve as a model for nanobot decontamination.
"As a manufacturing process, many delicate electronic devices are highly susceptible to contamination. We hope that understanding the biomechanical principles of these cleaning structures will help us to design bioinspired cleaning devices for cleaning on [a] micro and nano scale," concluded Hackmann.
Check out Hackmann's video below.
