Butterflies: A new source of inspiration for futuristic aerial robotics

Abstract: Nature is an inhabitant for enormous number of species. All the species do perform complex activities with simple and elegant rules for their survival. The property of emergence of collective behavior is remarkably supporting their activities. One form of the collective behaviour is the swarm intelligence -- all agents poses same rules and capabilities. This equality along with local cooperation in the agents tremendously leads to achieving global results. Some of the swarm behaviours in the nature includes birds formations , fish school maneuverings, ants movement. Recently, one school of research has studied these behaviours and proposed artificial paradigms such as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Glowworm Swarm Optimization (GSO) etc. Another school of research used these models and designed robotic platforms to detect (locate) multiple signal sources such as light, fire, plume, odour etc. Kinbots platform is one such recent experiment. In the same line of thought, this extended abstract presents the recently proposed butterfly inspired metaphor and corresponding simulations, ongoing experiments with outcomes.