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Interpretive station
Published in James Barilla, Naturebot, 2021
Designing an artificial pathway for this translation of sonic stimuli is one step; the other is to figure out what kind of data is actually traveling down that pathway as the bat interacts with the landscape. The basic assumption is that bats are not operating randomly in these environments; they’re not just crashing through the undergrowth. There must be patterns they’re recognizing, based on differences in the signals between one area and another. But what would be an accurate model for the “beam patterns” we know bats must be detecting when they operate among the leaves? What does a leaf sound like to a bat? What about hundreds of leaves in a forest composed of pine, magnolia, and maple? Müller and his research team have been studying this problem for over a decade, using different simulations to model leaves in space—flat and smooth circular discs, for example, or foliage models that take into account the average radius of the leaves, their orientation, and their density. Recent models then add a layer of branching representation according to what’s known as an L-system model, named after the Hungarian botanist Aristid Lindenmayer, who developed an algorithm for generating representations of branching patterns in plants. The results look like elegantly stylized pencil sketches.
Dialectics of Nature: Inspiration for Computing
Published in Nazmul Siddique, Hojjat Adeli, Nature-Inspired Computing, 2017
The beauty of the patterns observed in nature has attracted the attention of researchers for many years. In 1968, Lindenmayer (1968) introduced formalism for simulating the development of multicellular organisms, initially known as Lindenmayer systems and subsequently named L-systems, which attracted the immediate interest of theoretical computer scientists. The development of the mathematical theory of L-systems was followed by its applications to the modeling of plants. The central concept of L-systems is that of rewriting. In general, rewriting is a technique for defining complex objects by successively replacing parts of a simple initial object using a set of rewriting rules or productions. However, although a geometrical interpretation of strings was at the origin of L-systems, they were not applied to picture generation until 1984, when Aono and Kunii (1984) and Smith (1984) used them to create realistic-looking images of trees and plants.
Lightweight porous support structure design for additive manufacturing via knowledge-based bio-inspired volume generation and lattice configuration
Published in Virtual and Physical Prototyping, 2022
Zhiping Wang, Yicha Zhang, Alain Bernard
In this subsection, the bottom-up tree-shaped structure generation method is employed to provide a stable support for optimal support points on the identified overhang areas. To build a set of parametric knowledge-based tree-shaped support structures, the mathematical theory of L-systems (Rozenberg and Salomaa 1980), which is inspired by the growing of plants, is adopted as the growing rule for the base of a tree-shaped structure development. Figure 7 shows the definition of a directed-graph L-system tree in 2D.