Good morning.
It’s a rainy day for Whitewater, with a high temperature of about sixty. The days are growing shorter by a small amount; today is about three minutes darker than yesterday.
Common Council meets tonight at 6 p.m. The meeting agenda is available online.
Scientists in Switzerland have found a way to design and program small autonomous flying robots to flock like birds, an achievement that may make mapping or surveillance easier:
The swarming behavior is based on a three-dimensional algorithm that represents the movements of schools of fish and flocks of birds. The algorithm, developed in 1986 by Craig Reynolds, was first used as a computer graphics tool. In the algorithm, as in real flocks, the individual agents behave simply. They respond to their close neighbors without considering the movements of the group. Yet out of the noise, larger patterns emerge, coherent and beautiful.
“Flocking requires three things. You need to move with the same speed and direction as your neighbors, you need to avoid hitting them and you need to stay close,” said Hauert, who is now a post-doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When programming the robots, Hauert and Floreano added in a fourth ability: migration. With this ability, the robot swarm can travel to a set location, making them more useful as search and surveillance tools.
See, Autonomous Flying Robots Flock Like Birds.
Any yet, still farther to go to match this flock –