Stanford Radio

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman "Nick Ouellette: What flocks of birds can tell us about engineering" A civil engineer explains how new insights gleaned from the flight of birds may one day be applied to fields as far-ranging as autonomous cars and crowd control. Anyone who has ever observed a large flock of starlings in flight — darting and swirling as if the entire flock were one big beautiful being — cannot help but marvel and wonder at how all those birds keep from crashing into one another. Nick Ouellette is studying the in-flight behavior of birds to draw lessons he can apply to engineering. He says that birds are not alone in their tightly coordinated patterns of movement; such behaviors can be observed at every scale of nature, from bacteria to bees to beluga whales. Ouellette is doing sophisticated video measurements of flocks in flight to understand just how it is that birds can pull off their beautiful balletics without total chaos. He says the secret is that nature favors decentralize