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

高度分散的“群”系统对工程师具有吸引力，即整体超过部分之和，也就是说，群的集体行为比群中每个成员的行为更复杂和更有用。研究表明，个体遵循的简单规则导致了自然界中复杂的“社会”，例如蚂蚁和白蚁。除了空间分布之外，这种方法还提供了健壮性、冗余性，特别是并行信息处理。在工程方面，电子和光电子设备的大规模生产使由成百上千个单独元件组成的系统在技术上和经济上都是可行的。该项目建立在约克大学视觉传感器研究(Visor)实验室在分布式系统方面的丰富经验基础上，特别是图像信息的获取和综合处理。例子包括基于空间的传感器元阵列，以及目前在电子复眼和其他分布式传感器系统方面的工作。

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.