Group items tagged

they presented it briefly at the 4S symposium (unfortunately really briefly..) FF is though only one of their tech demos on PRISMA

Nice formation flying, though I still prefer Dario's 3D animation

very nice indeed!!

finally cross-scale is not selected, it was the only cosmic vision mission with multi-satellites formation flying, since the concept for Xeus has changed. There is still Swarm but it's not really formation flying... So ESA is missing something here...

Another great presentation at this conference!! Plus I always wanted to enter the numerical computations of orbit around black holes.... with Luzi we had a project on formation flying around black holes .... revolutionary idea (of course we did not do it!!!)

nice movie, and song :) we should definitely implement GR orbits in pagmo !

I agree Marek, yet was it practical for Apollonio to study conic sections more than 1500 years before Kepler found his three laws? And here is a good paper to start with: http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v77/i10/e103005, making an analogy between the periodic table and the taxomony of all orbits around a black hole.

A biologist working on swarm behaviour of various types. Just gave a rather cool talk in Newton in the formation flying conference.

A Hungarian team has created the first drones that can fly as a coordinated flock. The researchers watched as the ten autonomous robots took to the air in a field outside Budapest, zipping through the open sky, flying in formation or even following a leader, all without any central control.

old news, but wow .... Nature is becoming more and more like a magazine and less and less a scientific journal. This stuff is highly irrelevant but to the group that did it.

this is not a nature paper but just an article on their website - the papers they provide as references are all old

On the way towards autonomous flying deliveries and building a Megazord formation!

Bacteria found at 8-15 km altitude could play a much bigger role in cloud formation and precipitation than previously thought... According to this study bacteria represent around 20 % of the total atmospheric aerosols in their size range! They say it could also have implications for the spread of diseases...

20% ????

What is the best (wisest) size for a group of individuals? Couzin and Kao put together a series of mathematical models that included correlation and several cues. In one model, for example, a group of animals had to choose between two options-think of two places to find food. But the cues for each choice were not equally reliable, nor were they equally correlated. The scientists found that in these models, a group was more likely to choose the superior option than an individual. Common experience will make us expect that the bigger the group got, the wiser it would become. But they found something very different. Small groups did better than individuals. But bigger groups did not do better than small groups. In fact, they did worse. A group of 5 to 20 individuals made better decisions than an infinitely large crowd. The problem with big groups is this: a faction of the group will follow correlated cues-in other words, the cues that look the same to many individuals. If a correlated cue is misleading, it may cause the whole faction to cast the wrong vote. Couzin and Kao found that this faction can drown out the diversity of information coming from the uncorrelated cue. And this problem only gets worse as the group gets bigger.

Couzin research was the starting point that co-inspired PaGMO from the very beginning. We invited him (and he came) at a formation flying conference for a plenary here in ESTEC. You can see PaGMO as a collective problem solving simulation. In that respect, we learned already that the size of the group and its internal structure (topology) counts and cannot be too large or too random. One of the project the ACT is running (and currently seeking for new ideas/actors) is briefly described here (http://esa.github.io/pygmo/examples/example2.html) and attempts answering the question :"How is collective decision making influenced by the information flow through the group?" by looking at complex simulations of large 'archipelagos'.

An ACT classical subject