Related papers: An Entropic Model for Assessing Avian Flight Forma…

We consider flocks of artificial birds and study the emergence of V-like formations during flight. We introduce a small set of fully distributed positioning rules to guide the birds' movements and demonstrate, by means of simulations, that…

Collective patterns of motion emerge across biological taxa: insects swarm, fish school, and birds flock. In particular, large migratory birds form strikingly ordered V-shaped formations, which experiments and direct numerical simulations…

Self-organization creates new order and shifts sub-boundaries while reorganizing energy and entropy within a control volume. This article examines pathway selection and tests whether maximizing the entropy generation rate can forecast…

Thermal soaring saves much energy, but flying large distances in this form represents a great challenge for birds, people and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The solution is to make use of so-called thermals, which are localized, warmer…

Thermal soaring enables birds to perform cost-efficient flights during foraging or migration trips. Yet, although all soaring birds exploit vertical winds effectively, this group contains species that vary strongly in their morphologies.…

Research on the birth and evolution of life are reviewed with reference to the maximum entropy production principle (MEPP). It has been shown that this principle is essential for consistent understanding of the birth and evolution of life.…

The study of robotic flocking has received significant attention in the past twenty years. In this article, we present a constraint-driven control algorithm that minimizes the energy consumption of individual agents and yields an emergent V…

We present recent results that demonstrate the power of viewing the problem of V-formation in a flock of birds as one of Model Predictive Control (MPC). The V-formation-MPC marriage can be understood in terms of the problem of synthesizing…

For tracking and motion capture (MoCap) of animals in their natural habitat, a formation of safe and silent aerial platforms, such as airships with on-board cameras, is well suited. In our prior work we derived formation properties for…

We demonstrate formation flying for drone swarm services. A set of drones fly in four different swarm formations. A dataset is collected to study the effect of formation flying on energy consumption. We conduct a set of experiments to study…

Entropy production rate (EPR) is often effective to describe how a structure is self-organized in a nonequilibrium thermodynamic system. The "minimum EPR principle" is widely applicable to characterizing self-organized structures, but is…

Birds in a flock move in a correlated way, resulting in large polarization of velocities. A good understanding of this collective behavior exists for linear motion of the flock. Yet observing actual birds, the center of mass of the group…

The albatross optimized flight maneuver -- known as dynamic soaring -- is nothing but a wonder of biology, physics, and engineering. By utilizing dynamic soaring, the bird can travel in the desired flight direction almost for free by…

Formation flight is when multiple objects fly together in a coordination. Various automatic control methods have been used for the autonomous execution of formation flight of aerial vehicles. In this paper, the capacity of the model…

In this paper, we show how the MEP hypothesis may be used to build simple climate models without representing explicitly the energy transport by the atmosphere. The purpose is twofold. First, we assess the performance of the MEP hypothesis…

When birds come together to form a flock, the distribution of their individual velocities narrows around the mean velocity of the flock. We argue that, in a broad class of models for the joint distribution of positions and velocities, this…

Computational models of collective behavior in birds has allowed us to infer interaction rules directly from experimental data. Using a generic form of these rules we explore the collective behavior and emergent dynamics of a simulated…

Production of energy (metabolism) and its distribution is vital for living organisms, both at individual level - between different functions of an organism, as well as between species of communities at different organizational levels,…

Stability of flapping flight, a natural requirement for flying insects, is one of the major challenges for designing micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). To better understand how a flying insect could stabilize itself during hover, we have…

Gliding saves much energy, and to make large distances using only this form of flight represents a great challenge for both birds and people. The solution is to make use of the so-called thermals, which are localized, warmer regions in the…