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Researchers Reference Flocking Birds to Improve Swarmbots
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."
Craig Reynolds was doing this many years ago: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/
Researching bird flight and it's applications: £2m
Developing autonomous swarming robots: £5m
Watching your prototype robots fly straight into the nearest window at high speed and die: Priceless
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
Does this mean that a remake of "The Birds" with robotic birds will be in the offing, then?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Insects swarm, birds flock. Shouldn't theses be called "flockbots"?
Alfred Hitchcock unavailable for comment.
It's only a movie. It's not -real- blood. ;-p
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Perhaps the OP could consider that not all robots are human killing machines, and this kind of swarming/flocking behavior could be applied to something like vehicular safety. I've often pondered the idea of lateral lines on fish, and how quickly a school of fish can become aware of the motions of surrounding fish and other obstacles, remaining in formation but moving as seemingly one unit. How great would it be if robotic cars could react thousands of times faster than a human, and in concert, to flow seamlessly around a tire blowout, or debris that fell off a truck onto the highway? Aren't these kinds of goals the very reason we do this kind of research, and isn't the application of this reserach to improve our quality of life the very thing that pushes mankind forward intellectually?
This is old.... OLD news. It is a simple mob effect. See Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams
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 start matching or exceeding their perceived risk of breaking off of the mob. The person who begins to break off will be at an equilibrium of sorts... if the mob keeps going and are going to leave this person behind, either their want levels have to have a bit of increase, or they join back into the mob, because they don't want to be singled out. The other scenario is parts of the mob will notice said person breaking off and their perception of risk goes down, where more of the mob will follow... then the more that follow, the more that end up following.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
It's not funny and it's not useful.
Dog is my co-pilot.
The author seems to have an unfortunately negative attitude to the idea of robot swarms.
ftfa - ' A swarm of bees is frightening enough, but a swarm of robots is worse.'
What the author is missing is the idea that a swarm of bees is one of the most amazing examples of cooperation in the animal kingdom. Anybody would agree that, by itself, a single bee is a simple organism capable of only a very few rudimentary tasks. Yet a swarm of bees can build structures of a complexity humans are now only beginning to rival and are still the most efficient way to collect nectar and create honey.
With that said, the attractiveness of swarms is more in the cost efficiency of the robots that will eventual be part of these swarms. Like the now infamous storm bot which is able to utilize simple and relatively cheap computers around the world to create a very impressive super computer cluster to carry out tasks that would normally require very expensive hardware, the idea of robot swarms is to utilize the economies of scales to create affordable and simple robots to achieve complicated goals.
While flying in an V shape seems rather useless, it is a necessary step towards building networks of simple robots that will one day be responsible for everything from farming to repairing space stations. The idea of robot swarms lends nicely to the idea of self healing and adapting networks of bots, where a single device failure can be dealt with efficiently and quickly.
Modelling bird swarming behaviour isn't new. Applying 20-year-old research to robots isn't exciting.
I was intrigued about what the actual algorithm used by the starlings was, but the referenced article didn't elucidate. Eventually I found a link to http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/01/29/scistarling129.xml hidden at the bottom - it has a little more detail. Enjoy!
Do as you would be done to.
I would imagine that some clever network folk could use this research to develop interesting parallel-distributed network management algorithms. After all, a large data packet is not unlike flying bird that does not "want" to collide with other packets in large network (= transport medium = "air"). Assuming the coordination packets are much much smaller than the data packets, this scheme would cost-effectively prevent collisions and congestion by optimizing the spread of data both cross-sectionally and longitudinally in a network.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
They might not be "appreciating" nature, but they say imitation the sincerest form of flattery.
Thank God the robot swarm is here!
"My God...it's full of spam"
Stop using whatcouldpossiblygowrong for crying out loud, it completely defeats the purpose of having tags if all the articles have the same tags.
No link to the actual article or anything w/ birds in the summary. Here it is: http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_60/iss_10/28_1.shtml
Space and Computers.
flocknotposixcompliant
Even that article doesn't give the results - just a loose characterization of them.
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. Maybe we'll get a mathematical/algorithmic description of what the swarming birds are up to once they file their final report.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The article in The Telegraph.
The research group
Funding from CORDIS of 1.16 million euros, total cost 1.29 million euros. [rja]
The original paper about this must be getting a bit old. Time to bring out a new one!
"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.
"Interaction ruling animal collective behavior depends on topological rather than metric distance: Evidence from a field study"
M. Ballerini, N. Cabibbo, R. Candelier, A. Cavagna, E. Cisbani, I. Giardina, V. Lecomte, A. Orlandi, G. Parisi, A. Procaccini, M. Viale, and V. Zdravkovic
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/105/4/1232
I was doing a project for a robotics laboratory in switzerland when a post-doc showed the facilities to his friends and said "...we are not building robots for the army, but for rescue missions instead" well, how is he gonna make sure that his nonlinear oscillator based cpg's won't be used for crocodile sized armored autonomous jungle-saurians once they get that salamander going? some special copyright-law for pacifist roboticists?
get over it, most of the good roboticists are or will be part of some weapon industry. Who will and who won't is not a choice of the roboticist but that of some swarm dressed in neat uniforms.
...as "researchers reference f*cking birds to improve swarmbots"? It puts a whole new spin on TFA.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/01/29/scistarling129.xml
Someone tried to explain this to the general public waay back in 1990.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/navy/docs/np13/np13appc.htm
MMO Vampire Role Playing
Will this research improve applications following RFC 2549?
:)
You have no idea how long I waited to try to use that within context
I don't want my robots swarming.
I want them alone, cold and a little bit afraid. I think it will make it easier to keep them in line.
Sooooo....
patent your swarm net before it gets declared a military secret and you'll make out like a bandito.
Sounds astonishingly like Michael Crichton's book "Prey". ;-)
Way cool, but let's hope the result is different.
Jurassic Park 16: Island of the Swarmbots!
"They're flocking this way!"
I've noticed that seagulls landing on a pier seem to want to land at the same place the bird in front of them landed. The bird in front obliges them by jumping off, into the water. Then the process repeats. It doesn't seem to make sense. There is plenty of space all along the pier; they could simply land in one of the many spaces where no other birds are. It probably keeps them organized, though, since they never have to fly off in complex patterns to find a parking spot, so to speak.