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Researchers Reference Flocking Birds to Improve Swarmbots

Posted by ryuzaki0 on 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."

3 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Tag by TurinPT · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Stop using whatcouldpossiblygowrong for crying out loud, it completely defeats the purpose of having tags if all the articles have the same tags.

    1. Re:Tag by quest(answer)ion · · Score: 2, Insightful

      it completely defeats the purpose of having tags if all the articles have the same tags. making the same joke over and over will kill it regardless of the way the joke is made.

      of course, /. is living proof that this stops no one.
      --
      /. is what happens when geeks talk. get used to it.
  2. Re:Boids by mrogers · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The cool thing about this new model is that each bird only needs to track a fixed number of neighbours (seven in the starling flock on which the paper is based). IIRC every bird in the Boids model needs to track every other bird to keep the swarm cohesive.

    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 bird tracks every other bird.