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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday January 16 2021, @11:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-keep-swimming dept.

Robotic swarm swims like a school of fish:

Schools of fish exhibit complex, synchronized behaviors that help them find food, migrate and evade predators. No one fish or team of fish coordinates these movements nor do fish communicate with each other about what to do next. Rather, these collective behaviors emerge from so-called implicit coordination — individual fish making decisions based on what they see their neighbors doing.

This type of decentralized, autonomous self-organization and coordination has long fascinated scientists, especially in the field of robotics.

Now, a team of researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed fish-inspired robots that can synchronize their movements like a real school of fish, without any external control. It is the first time researchers have demonstrated complex 3D collective behaviors with implicit coordination in underwater robots.

[...] "Our results with Blueswarm represent a significant milestone in the investigation of underwater self-organized collective behaviors," said [study co-author Radhika] Nagpal. "Insights from this research will help us develop future miniature underwater swarms that can perform environmental monitoring and search in visually-rich but fragile environments like coral reefs. This research also paves a way to better understand fish schools, by synthetically recreating their behavior."

Related Video: Robotic swarm swims like a school of fish (YouTube)

Journal Reference:
Florian Berlinger, Melvin Gauci, Radhika Nagpal. Implicit coordination for 3D underwater collective behaviors in a fish-inspired robot swarm [$], Science Robotics (DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.abd8668)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @12:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @12:45AM (#1101326)

    Ah, I can see it now. A horde of drones programmed to swarm. Flying in tandem over a protest crowd of [insert group you don't like here], releasing deadly neurotoxins. Call it a GlaDOS swarm.

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