TYOC#46/52: JeffShoaling
The Year of CoCoRo 46/52: The body shape of Jeff robots is much closer to fish than the shape of Lily robots. With their slim bodies, Jeff robots could tightly flock together and move in one direction as a group. We implemented a simple blue-light-LED-based algorithm that allows neighboring robots to align to each other. This is not working in 100% of the time but very often. And when we filmed the little fish that observed our experiments with robots in Livorno harbor (see at beginning of the movie) the natural fish also did not align for 100% of the time. So we came pretty close to them. We implemented this code only in a very short period of time (hours!) towards the end of the project, thus we think that with more time and a bit more of local neighbor communication the shoaling can be much improved in future. We hope to be able to further extend this in our follow up project subCULTron.