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Researchers Reference Flocking Birds to Improve Swarmbots
Posted by
Zonk
on Wed Jan 30, 2008 07:26 PM
from the shine-your-shoes-while-composing-a-song dept.
from the shine-your-shoes-while-composing-a-song dept.
inghamb87 writes "Scientists have studied flocks of starlings and cracked the mystery behind the birds' ability to fly in large formations, and regroup quickly after attacks, without getting confused and ramming into each other. While the information is cool, some scientists seem to think that the best use of this knowledge is not to aid our appreciation of nature, but to make more effective robot swarms. We've talked about swarming robots many times before, but usually researchers look to insects for inspiration."
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Boids (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Boids (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~paul/publications/boids/index.html [shef.ac.uk]
You can even play with the settings panel on the right side and set off "gunshots."
But yeah, this stuff is far from news.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I haven't read the paper yet, but it seems like there could be a parallel with gossip protocols and flooding protocols: if each bird tracks a small number of randomly chosen neighbours, information can move through the swarm just as efficiently as if each
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http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/05/landscape-with-weapon.html [newscientist.com]
No, but think swarming spambots ... (Score:2)
"Modelling bird swarming behaviour isn't new. Applying 20-year-old research to robots isn't exciting."
Or swarming worms ... DDoSwarming one web server after another.
No more need for IRC C&C ... just release the swarm into the wild.
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Modelled after birds? (Score:5, Funny)
Developing autonomous swarming robots: £5m
Watching your prototype robots fly straight into the nearest window at high speed and die: Priceless
Odd to dismiss it so early (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Now you've foiled my nefarious plan!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
get over it, most of the good roboticists are or will be part of some weapon industry.
Indeed, it's very hard to be part of an industry that doesn't at least indirectly help the military. Even an improvement in textile loom speed can produce cheaper uniforms. The military has a keen interest in everything from alternative fuels, to advances in materials science, to food preservatives. If you can think of an improvement for something, it is likely that it can (and will) be used in some way, however small, to kill people more efficiently.
:)
As you say, get over it.
Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams (Score:2, Interesting)
The nature behind it is rather simple. Imagine you have a mob of angry rioters walking down the street. No one really has a plan, but the mob moves together. More or less, no one individually generally wants to break off by themselves and smash in a window and take a TV from the appliance store. It is perceived as a risk of sorts. Eventually though, someone will want to do something enough that their want levels st
FA Just Another Dreamy Blog (Score:3, Informative)
jumbo packet swarms in mesh networks (Score:3, Interesting)
Not appreciating, just flattering. (Score:2)
Tag (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Tag (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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of course,
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Link to article (Score:2)
Still don't see a solution - or description. (Score:2)
But it DOES show that they've (so far) only discovered a couple ways that some parts of the behavior's laws are clearly different from what was previously assumed: That the spacing is non-isotropic in the short range and that the birds are interacting with particular individual neighbors, rather than interchangeably with whatever other birds are within a certain distance.
Still got a year to go on the three-year project. May
Re: (Score:2)
See my reply to the GP for a link to their preprint. In the preprint, notes to figure 4, they describe how to set up a numerical simulation with the behaviour they observed. The model just considers headings, not velocities, and at each timestep just averages the current heading with those of n nearest neighbours, without regard to how far those n neighbours are away.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Interaction Ruling Animal Collective Behaviour Depends on Topological rather than Metric Distance: Evidence from a Field Study [arxiv.org]
Numerical models indicate that collective animal behaviour may emerge from simple local rules of interaction among the individuals. However, very little is known about the nature of such interaction, so that models and theories mostly rely on aprioristic assumptions. By reconstructing the three-dimensional position of individual birds in airborne flocks