Co-sponsored by: Rice University, ECE Dept.

In almost every branch of the natural and social sciences, one often encounters systems where simple localized rules of interaction among individual units lead to the emergence of complex collective phenomena. Examples range from insect colonies to physical gas laws, and from macroeconomics to the behavior of large human crowds. This observation is naturally also of great interest to a wide range of engineering fields. A substantial amount of interdisciplinary research within the last forty years has been motivated by a desire to understand these emergent complex systems and to utilize them whenever appropriate for designing efficient engineering systems such as multi-agent robots and drones.

In this talk, we focus on one particular line of research within this area: collective motion. This macroscopic phenomenon typically emerges in large multi-particle systems by invoking a few simple alignment and consensus rules locally within small radii of influence around each individual. To this end, we review various attempts in the research literature at numerically simulating the collective motion of bird flocks and fish schools, and highlight the role played by basic physical concepts such as phase transitions, statistical mechanics, and scale-free correlations. In addition, we shed light on a number of contributions from the field of automatic control theory where several researchers have provided solid theoretical foundations in the last few years for certain consensus-based observations by formulating the problem within a feedback dynamic system framework and employing technical results from network theory and related disciplines. Finally, we review a few open research problems and suggest potential lines of attack to address them.

Speaker(s): Saad Saleh,

Agenda:

Technical talk at 4pm in Duncan Hall Room 1064, Rice Univ. campus, 6100 Main St., Houston, TX 77005. Technical presentation is free.

Location:
Room: 1064
Bldg: Duncan Hall
Rice University
6100 Main St.
Houston, Texas
77005