What’s beautiful about studying animal groups and other, what we generally call multi-agent systems, is that even if the individual agents are very simple and obey very simple rules, the behavior that emerges from the group is quite complex. Fish tend to reorient their swimming direction using the swimming directions of their neighbors. Birds tend to separate themselves from other birds using the relative position and velocity of their neighbors. Look at the beautiful patterns that you see sometimes in D.C. in the dusk when all the starlings are swirling around to roost in the Smithsonians. As an engineer, we look at those for inspiration and say: Can we replicate some of these capabilities in robotic platforms that are governed by simple rules?

Source: Washington Post July 29, 2021 12:34 UTC