COME FLY WITH ME...
One of the most popular posts on this site since its inception was a piece titled "On Google Taking to the Skies". It talked about the mapping race being engaged in by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo! et al, gathering momentum.
It's in that context that this article by David Pescovitz in thefeature.com (courtesy of Boing Boing), caught my eye...with a title like "Flocks of flying bluetooth robots may soon take to the skies for a distributed bird's eye view", how could it not? An excerpt:
A typical flock of 2,000 starlings contains as much brain tissue as a single human being. Of course, you can't link together bird brains. Not real birds, anyway. But a small group of roboticists at the University of Essex are designing a system to wirelessly network a swarm of tiny, Bluetooth-enabled unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) into a cluster of flying computers acting as one processor more powerful than the sum of its bots.
Someday, flocks of shoebox-sized UAVs called UltraSwarms could act as a distributed eye in the sky, monitoring highway traffic, aiding in crowd control or even entertainment at massive sports arenas or, of course, embarking on military surveillance missions. Much of the data they gather -- video from onboard cameras, for example -- will be dealt with in the sky, delivering only "news you can use" to a central command.
For any of these applications to fly though, the researchers must weave together two threads in computer science research: cluster computing and swarm intelligence. They're presenting a scientific paper (PDF) about the project at the 2005 IEEE Swarm Intelligence Conference this week in Pasadena, California.
Google is already raising the ante according to SiliconValleyWatcher.com in the 3D mapping race:
Google plans to use trucks equipped with lasers and digital photographic equipment to create a realistic 3D online version of San Francisco, and eventually other major US cities.
The move would trump Amazon's A9 service, which offers two-dimensional photos of buildings on US city streets.
The trucks would drive along every San Francisco street using the lasers to measure the dimensions of buildings, to create a 3D framework onto which digital photos can be mapped. This would complement the mostly top-down view of San Francisco available through Google's Keyhole satellite photo application.
The goal is to create similar 3D online versions of other cities in the US and overseas.
Given this interest, the portals could soon be creating their own ultraswarms around these scientists across the pond. And then, we could see these search swarms crawling the skies much like the search crawlers swarm the web today...
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