A new Georgia Tech Research News article describes the efforts of scientists to use automated animal movement analysis to improve robot interaction. As part of the BioTracking project, Georgia Tech researchers at the BORG Lab are developing several techniques for automatically tracking and modeling the movements of social insects such as ants and bees. By studying the sequence of motions of the insects, the researchers hope to reverse engineer the algorithms that drive them and implement those algorithms in software on simulators and actual robots. If you're interested in learning more about their plans, you may want to attend the International Workshop on the Mathematics and Algorithms of Social Insects Dec 15-17 at the Georgia Institute of Technology.