Simulated Hornet Attack on a Crowd in a Virtual Environment

Abstract

Simulation of natural phenomena in a virtual environment is an intriguing and complex open research area where significant research e ort has been devoted to discover interesting behaviours of insects and animals. Flock of birds, school of fish, group of working termites, and group of foraging ants are some natural behaviours that based to conduct many researches in Artificial Life field. Agent based insect/animal models that exhibit collective intelligent behaviour (swarm intelligence) are used for various purposes as same as virtual reality applications like films, games, medical applications, military applications, etc. The resulting swarm intelligence is used to define new clustering algorithms as well as to robotics and optimizations. This research explores about the modelling techniques to simulate natural behaviour of hornets (giant honey bees). Even though biologically hornets exhibit much similar behaviours to bees, there is a considerable deference in their aggressive behaviour. Beside that continuous attacks happened in public areas was also make major impact to conduct a research on developing an application to improve public awareness. Thus goal of this project was to find better modelling technique to simulate natural collective behaviour of hornets. Hence this research mainly concentrates on the applicability of Swarm Intelligence (SI) modelling techniques to simulate the hornets behaviour. Application consists with three main components as initialization, movement handling and collision handling. Concepts of bird s flocking behaviour and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm were utilized within those components. The PSO algorithm performs a major role in finding the best attacking position when involve in an attack. Implementation of the research was done by using OpenSteer C++ open source library component. The prototype was build on a machine with configurations of IntelCore2 Duo 2.66GHz processor with 2GB RAM and NVIDIA GeForce 9004(1GB) graphic card and performance testing was conducted using four machines with di erent configurations by varying the number of the agents.