Stephen Oney

During the course of this UROP, I allowed the flock of birds to communicate with programs and services using PVM, and wrote a rudimentary program to capture data from the flock of birds and the mental model positioning system to allow for comparisons. Doing this involved multiple steps. First, getting the flock to work. Currently there are three birds. They are configured according to the Flock of Birds Manual. With one (small) transmitter attached, and three sensors. The largest problem with getting the flock to work was realizing that a single pin had to be cut off of the serial cable; something that did not seem to be documented. If the pin is not cut, the flock will repeatedly send a DELAY command through this pin. Also, the most common problem with the flock when the flock is set up is interference. Sometimes, this interference will result in an error message being displayed by the bird to which the transmitter is attached (a bird displays an error by flashing its LED the number of times corresponding to the error number, with error numbers listed in the flock manual). At other times, this interference will not generate an error, but will instead throw off the data. There are four main sources for this interference. First, there seems to be a large amount of metal under the floor in the media lab, so placement of the transmitter on the floor would often result in an error. Second, the metallic table created interference. Third, Ripley itself can create interference with the flock. Lastly, any active wire placed very close to either the transmitter or sensor seemed to significantly throw off the data. The large amount of computers around the flock did not seem to have a significant effect on the accuracy when testing. Serial communication with the Flock of Birds can be quite complicated. Rather than creating new libraries for communication, I used libfob (current version 1.0.2). Libfob is a C++ interface for communicating with the flock that is able to get the data from a serial port, translate the orientation from a matrix to an array of three