The schooling behavior of fish is hypothesized to confer many survival benefits, including foraging success, safety from predators, and energy savings through hydrodynamic interactions when swimming in formation. Underwater robot collectives may be able to achieve similar benefits in future applications, e.g. using formation control to achieve efficient spatial sampling for environmental monitoring. Although many theoretical algorithms exist for multi-robot formation control, they have not been tested in the underwater domain due to the fundamental challenges in underwater communication. Here we introduce a leader-follower strategy for underwater formation control that allows us to realize complex 3D formations, using purely vision-based perception and a reactive control algorithm that is low computation. We use a physical platform, BlueSwarm, to demonstrate for the first time an experimental realization of inline, side-by-side, and staggered swimming 3D formations. More complex formations are studied in a physics-based simulator, providing new insights into the convergence and stability of formations given underwater inertial/drag conditions. Our findings lay the groundwork for future applications of underwater robot swarms in aquatic environments with minimal communication.

Schools of fish exhibit complex, synchronized behaviors that help them find food, migrate, and evade predators. No one fish or sub-group of fish coordinates these movements, nor do fish communicate with each other about what to do next. Rather, these collective behaviors emerge from so-called implicit coordination -- individual fish making decisions based on what they see their neighbors doing. This type of decentralized, autonomous self-organization and coordination has long fascinated scientists, especially in the field of robotics. Now, a team of researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed fish-inspired robots that can synchronize their movements like a real school of fish, without any external control.

A school of robotic fish that are able to coordinate their movements underwater - just like real fish - have been created by a team of engineers. Harvard University experts created the fish-inspired bots to work without any external control, mimicking the collective behaviours groups of fish demonstrate. Schools of fish exhibit complex, synchronised behaviours that help them find food, migrate and evade predators with no one fish coordinating the movements. The robotic fish can synchronise their movements like a real school of fish, without any external control - the first time this complex behaviour has been show in robots. The team say in future a similar swarm of robotic fish could be deployed to perform environmental monitoring and search in fragile environments like coral reefs.

Seven little Bluebots gently swim around a darkened tank in a Harvard University lab, spying on one another with great big eyes made of cameras. They're on the lookout for the two glowing blue LEDs fixed to the backs and bellies of their comrades, allowing the machines to lock on to one another and form schools, a complex emergent behavior arising from surprisingly simple algorithms. With very little prodding from their human engineers, the seven robots eventually arrange themselves in a swirling tornado, a common defensive maneuver among real-life fish called milling. Bluebot is the latest entry in a field known as swarm robotics, in which engineers try to get machines to, well, swarm. And not in a terrifying way, mind you: The quest is to get schools of Bluebots to swarm more and more like real fish, giving roboticists insights into how to improve everything from self-driving cars to the robots that may one day prepare Mars for human habitation.

Chatbots have become an integral part of digital communication across web, social media, and mobile app interfaces. Marketers are increasingly growing fond of chatbots because of effortless, fast-paced, and customer-centric communication in different contexts. With the increasing popularity of chatbots, more and more brands are embracing them. In 2019 and beyond, we can expect chatbots to play a mission-critical role in marketing. Let's dive into the increasing influence of chatbot marketing through some credible statistics: Let's offer some more insights regarding the popularity of the Chatbots.

AMAZON: Has opened an AI-powered convenience store in Seattle. The premise of Amazon Go is simple: to eliminate everyone's least-favorite part of the shopping experience, checking out. With ceiling-mounted sensors and cameras backed by artificial intelligence, Amazon is able to track every interaction a customer has with a product. It knows exactly when a product is picked up or put back. Go works like a physical manifestation of Amazon's 1-Click checkout, where you "click" by taking an item off a shelf.

There's an African proverb that says: "When the music changes, so does the dance". It illustrates a few key learnings: the importance of listening to the beat, and then adapting to what is coming our way to go with the flow. It's also representative of the shift in the way consumers are engaging in online interactions today -- and businesses need to listen attentively so they can best change their approaches to move in tandem to the beat. Long gone are the days where consumers are satisfied with traditional online experiences. A recent industry study, the "2018 State of Chatbots Report" highlighted common frustrations among website users: In addition, users are now spending more time in messaging apps than in social media. The number of global monthly active users for the top four messaging apps exceeded that of the top four social media networks in 2015, and these numbers continue to grow.