Flocks, herds and schools - the roles of individuals in distributed sensor systems

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Highly distributed 'swarm' systems have the attraction to engineers that the whole exceeds the sum of the parts, that is, that the collective behaviour of the swarm is more complex and useful than that of each member of the swarm.  Studies have shown that simple rules followed by the individual lead to the complex 'societies' demonstrated in the natural world by, for example, ants and termites. In addition to spatial distribution, such approaches provide robustness, redundancy, and in particular parallel information processing. In the engineering context, mass production of electronic and opto-electronic devices has made systems comprising hundreds or thousands of individual elements both technically and economically feasible. This project builds on the extensive experience of York University's Vision Sensor Research (VISOR) Laboratory in distributed systems, in particular the acquisition and integrated processing of image information. Examples include space-based meta-arrays of sensors and the current work on electronic compound eyes and other distributed sensor systems.The goal of the proposed project is to develop and implement on-chip, sensor-level and system-level techniques for dynamic optimisation of system resource allocation based on the scene and other dynamically changing environmental influences. Resources here refer to sensor selection, resolution, speed, data reduction and analysis, as well as communication methods, bandwidth, etc. To do this we will exploit concepts from natural systems, such as flocks of birds, schools of fish, or termite colonies. In particular, we need to understand how to develop simple behavioural rules for individual sensors which lead to a desired collective behaviour of the system that are practical for engineering applications. The  proposed research will develop technology valuable for ultra-low-power imaging systems-on-chip, biomedical applications, nano- and pico-satellites, and portable consumer products.