Simulating Ant Swarm Aggregations Dynamics

Ants exhibit unique abilities to self-assemble into animate, living structures. Such structures display properties of both fluid and solid-like, deformable materials. Despite much progress in our understanding of ant aggregation dynamics, simulating such phenomena has been largely overlooked in real-time graphics and animation applications. We present a constraints-based approach for simulating the collective dynamics of ants interactively with compelling physical realism. Through several experiments and comparisons, we demonstrate that our method can efficiently capture the underlying physical rules of such aggregations, which can inform further research into living structures that can morph and self-repair.