title: V-like formations in flocks of artificial birds.
abstract: We consider flocks of artificial birds and study the emergence of V-like formations during flight. We introduce a small set of fully distributed positioning rules to guide the birds' movements and demonstrate, by means of simulations, that they tend to lead to stabilization into several of the well-known V-like formations that have been observed in nature. We also provide quantitative indicators that we believe are closely related to achieving V-like formations, and study their behavior over a large set of independent simulations.
authors.affiliation: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Programa de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computação, COPPE, Caixa Postal 68511, 21941-972 Rio de Janeiro-RJ, Brazil. andrenth@cos.ufrj.br
authors.forename: Andre
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Nathan
authors.forename: Valmir C
authors.initials: VC
authors.lastname: Barbosa
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D001717:Birds / Q000502:physiology*; D005426:Flight, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D008954:Models, Biological