Can Autonomous Vehicles Mimic Animals?

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Engineers and computer scientists envision a future in which autonomous vehicles and drones will navigate highways and skyways with the same effortless ease we observe today in the motions and migrations of birds, fish, and mammals.

Antelope thundering across an African plain; sardines swirling in a vigorous baitball; a murmuration of starlings in an evening sky--nature provides many examples of swarms of animals that somehow coordinate their movements with no apparent leader issuing orders.

"Animals of every size, from insects to whales, display this kind of collective behavior," says Nicholas Ouellette, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.

Using sophisticated multi-camera video imagery, Ouellette precisely can measure and track each individual in a group, such as he did in a prior study on flying insects. From those multiple images, he can reconstruct a swarm, herd, school, or flock in three dimensions. He even can count the number of wingbeats of individual birds to ascertain how much energy is expended by each.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, Ouellette and Alex Thornton, an ecologist at England's University of Exeter, describe their joint discovery that mated pairs of birds are loyal, first and foremost, to each other, not to the group as a whole, and that this bonded behavior in flight has implications for the flight pattern of the entire flock. Put a bit differently birds of a feather do not exactly all flock together.

The finding is prompting reevaluation of long-held assumptions about group behavior that could have implications for fields such as robotics and driverless cars. As Ouellette explains, think of people weaving through pedestrian traffic on a crowded sidewalk. We proceed differently when we are with a close friend or mate, as opposed to when we are walking alone.

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