RESEARCHERS HOPE FIREFLIES WILL AID ROBOT COMMUNICATION

Researchers from the University of Colorado are studying the Great Smoky Mountains' synchronous fireflies to determine whether understanding the way they communicate could help with developing robot communication.

The fireflies "need to solve complex problems while communicating in large groups, which is something computers need to do," Orit Peleg, a computer scientist from the University of Colorado at Boulder, told the Knoxville News Sentinel. "So maybe there's something interesting we can learn about them and apply to man-made systems.

Semi-autonomous robots communicating with flashes of infrared light could be used to locate victims after a natural disaster, for example.

The researchers who sojourned to the park on the Tennessee-North Carolina border earlier this month to study the fireflies at their peak included graduate student Owen Martin and postdoctoral researcher Raphael Sarfati. Their research combines computer science, physics, engineering and biology.