Abstract. Flocking birds exhibit complex dynamic behavior such as wave propagation, coordinated turns, and consistent geometric patterns of tens of thousands of individuals. Understanding this behavior may inform diverse topics such as microscopic biological systems which display similar behavior and self-organization of autonomous robots. However, the behavior required for individual birds to create such incredible group dynamics is still not well understood. In this presentation, I will describe and demonstrate a distributed declarative model for these flocks that aims to reproduce these properties. Unlike a typical rule-based approach, each bird in this model moves with the goal of minimizing a cost function that encodes its individual objectives. To make this simulation fast and interactive, it has been implemented in WebGL to run in a webpage on any modern computer while taking full advantage of any available graphics hardware. As a result, running the model is as simple as clicking on a URL and parameters can be adjusted in real-time. This presentation will discuss declarative flocking, benefits and challenges of using WebGL for agent-based simulation and rendering, and how various model configurations affect flocking behavior and compare to real-world observations.
| DS21 Home 2021 | Program | Speaker Index |