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, a physicist and an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. “My lab is trying to understand how they do it.”
Read more at Stanford University