In our project, we investigate the army ants’ behavior and their ability to construct complex bridges from their own bodies in order to span long gaps. These bridges are an example of a living architecture with dynamic properties that can help in understanding emergent structures in complex systems.

According to the key aspects derived from our biological role model, we formed the goal of our project: “Create a bottom-up design of a bridge which is based on the behavior of individuals and their local interactions and is able to adapt real-time to environmental conditions.”

To inform the whole process with a real-time structural optimization that can make the bridge adaptable to various performative needs we used Karamba in Grasshopper which can make the structural optimization of the bridge. In each step, the agent was categorized according to their level of tension which was affecting the next movement of them. To enhance performance the whole application was broken down into smaller applications which were running in parallel threads.

Also, we implemented networking to run some services on other computers and use the result in the main process.