Guangdong HUST Industrial Technology Research Institute, Guangdong Province Key Lab of Digital Manufacturing Equipment, Dongguan, 523000, China.
Key Laboratory of Image Processing and Intelligent Control, School of Automation, State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipments and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China.
Sci Rep. 2017 Sep 5;7(1):10452. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-09986-5.
Collective circular motion is a common yet spectacular behavior of pigeon flocks. Efficient and robust inter-individual communication is required for flock coordination during this widely-spreaded movement pattern. When a flock hovers near the home loft, the rotational direction undergoes regular spontaneous variations. Based on intensive analyses of high spatial-temporal resolution GPS data, we quantified the intensity of velocity alignment among different individuals in terms of their velocity fluctuations. It is found that pigeon flocks employ an intermittent interaction (alignment) mechanism, where intra-group information transmission is not required at every instant. However, the union of the topologies of several consecutive interaction networks always keeps connected. This biological observation strongly suggests the presence of a jointly connected topology in pigeon flocks, which helps substantially reduce the communication and/or information processing requirements while retaining the agility and stability of the group. Finally, we conducted extensive investigation on the interaction mechanism as well as the spontaneous changes in rotational direction of pigeon flocks. These results shed some light onto the coordination mechanism exploration of bird flocks' collective motions.
群体圆周运动是鸽子群中一种常见而壮观的行为。在这种广泛传播的运动模式中，群体协调需要高效且稳健的个体间通信。当一群鸽子在鸽舍附近盘旋时，旋转方向会发生有规律的自发变化。基于对高时空分辨率 GPS 数据的深入分析，我们根据个体速度波动，量化了不同个体之间速度对齐的强度。结果发现，鸽子群采用了间歇性相互作用（对齐）机制，即在任何时刻都不需要进行组内信息传输。然而，几个连续相互作用网络的拓扑结构的联合总是保持连通的。这种生物学观察强烈表明，鸽子群中存在一个共同连接的拓扑结构，这有助于在保持群体的敏捷性和稳定性的同时，大大降低通信和/或信息处理的要求。最后，我们对鸽子群的相互作用机制以及旋转方向的自发变化进行了广泛的研究。这些结果为鸟类群体的集体运动的协调机制探索提供了一些启示。
