Arthur and others,
First of all, I'm very pleased with all of your comments. The background
of my interest in swarming and social insects is that I'm currently
involved in some projects in which the focus is on "car-to-car"
communication and "smart" road concepts. With this in mind I was
wondering how ants and in some extent bees/wasps do deal with their
"traffic" problems. I'm aware that ants have several very effective
solutions for pretty tough problems (routing, cooperation etc). And I
know that bees, besides their astonishing navigation and communication
skills, do use some kind of "dominance-index" to solve (traffic)
conflicts within their hives. While thinking about the massive numbers
of individuals crawling around the tunnels of their nests I'm wondering
what mechanisms might be found to keep such a organisation effective.
Besides the work above, we started some research into the concepts of
self-organisation and the potential technological/industrial
applications - i.e. smart (large scale) sensor networks,
multi-agent/robot systems, self-repairing systems etc. - actually we are
trying to convince our collegaes(!) and (industrial) partners about the
potential benefits of a "biological inspired" approach - and so any
ideas about illustrative applications are very welcome
regards,
Thonie van Lieburg, M.Sc.
TNO Physics and Electronics Laboratory
group Command&Control
Netherlands
www.tno.nl,[log in to unmask]
Arthur Brandwood wrote:
>
> Hi Thonie,
>
> Welcome to the list!
>
> Have a look at the work of Mandyam Srinivasan at Australian National
> University. See
> http://biology.anu.edu.au/rsbsweb/profiles/srini.shtml His group has
> done a lot of work on bee flight from a range of aspects, particularly
> vision and swarming behaviour.
>
> They are also working on a range of biomimetic applications of their
> work including robotic vision and flight control systems for pilotless
> aircraft including consideration of insect foraging strategies and
> application to autonomous "foraging" behaviour for multiple vehicles
> in aerial surveillance.
>
> Arthur Brandwood
>
> At 08:46 PM 6/02/2003, you wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Hopefully I pickecd the right list - I'm research engineer who's
> > background is in theorectical biology and bioinformatics. I'm very
> > interested in what's sometimes called "biological inspired
> > technologies"
> > and I'm trying to use biological principles as main inspiration
> > while
> > tackling technological challenges (related to areas like crisis
> > management, traffic management, decision support,"intelligent"
> > systems,
> > etc). Currently we are working on the application of
> > self-organisation
> > concepts in (at least) the context of traffic management. One aspect
> > we've looked at is swarm-intelligence and we are excited about
> > possible
> > applications. Besides that I'm looking for good references about
> > colony
> > behavior of social insects escpecially related to in-hive behavior
> > (I'm
> > hoping to find possible clues here about natural "traffic-jams").
> > Any
> > help or hints are greatly appreciated!!
> >
> >
> > regards,
> >
> > Thonie van Lieburg, M.Sc.
> > TNO Physics and Electronics Laboratory
> > group Command&Control
> > Netherlands
> > www.tno.nl,[log in to unmask]
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Arthur Brandwood
> Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering
> UNSW Sydney Australia 2052
> [log in to unmask]
> Tel/Fax: +61 (0)2 6291 3850
> Mobile: +61 (0)411 285 207
|