Decentralized Formation Selection Mechanisms Inspired by Foraging Bottlenose Dolphins

Presented at the Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems, Blacksburg, VA, July 2008

Navigating a Tangled Intersection: Agricultural Communication as Public Meeting Space among the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Digital

The growing emphasis on interdisciplinarity within scholarly research offers several affordances, including an opportunity to initiate cross-disciplinary projects. By viewing instances of agricultural discourse in public contexts through a technical communication disciplinary framework, the collection 'Cultivating Spheres: Agriculture, Technical Communication, and the Publics' demonstrates how social sciences methodologies reveal such discourse as in fact embodying the digital humanities

Containment in Leader-Follower Networks with Switching Communication Topologies

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Automatica. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Automatica, Volume 47, Issue 5, May 2011, Pages 1035-1040, DOI: 10.1016/j.automatica.2011.01.077We study bipartite, first-order networks where the nodes take on leader or follower roles. Specifically, we let the leaders' positions be static and assume that leaders and followers communicate via an undirected switching graph topology. This assumption is inspired by the swarming behavior of Silkworm moths, where female moths intermittently release pheromones to be detected by the males. The main result presented here states that if the followers execute the linear agreement protocol, they will converge to the convex hull spanned by the leaders' positions as long as the time-vary undirected graph defining the communication among all agents is jointly connected. The novelty of this research is that we use Lasalle's invariance principle for switched systems, and additionally, the result is shown to hold for arbitrary state dimensions

Biologically Inspired Coalition Formation of Multi-Agent Systems

© 2010, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.We model the multi-level alliance forming ability of male bottlenose dolphins to develop a decentralized multi-level coalition formation algorithm for a multi-agent system. The goal is to produce a model that is rich enough to capture the biological phenomenon of forming alliances, yet remain simple so that it can be implemented on engineered systems, such as network of unmanned vehicles

Rendezvous with Multiple, Intermittent Leaders

(c) 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Digital Object Identifier : 10.1109/CDC.2009.5400560In this paper we study bipartite, first order-networks where the nodes take on leader or follower roles. In particular, we let the leaders' positions be static and assume that they are only intermittently visible to the followers. This is an assumption that is inspired by the way female silkworm moths only intermittently release pheromones to be detected by the males. The main result in this paper states that if the followers execute the linear agreement protocol, they will converge to the convex hull spanned by the leaders (may they be visible or not)

First-Order, Networked Control Models of Swarming Silkworm Moths

© 2008 AACCDigital Object Identifier : 10.1109/ACC.2008.4587085Social insects have long served as inspiration to the multi-agent community. In this paper, we take the opposite approach and see if tools from decentralized, networked control can be used to predict observed, biological behaviors. In particular, we study the silkworm moth, the Bombyx Mori, and we model these moths as first-order networks in which the male-male interactions are defined through a proximity graph. The male-female interactions are given by a broadcast protocol in which the females that are releasing pheromones are visible to all the males. Using barrier certificates, the resulting, switched network is analyzed and it is shown that the males are attracted to and trapped in a region defined by the female moths, as is the case in actual silkworm moths as well

Sustainable Group Sizes for Multi-Agent Search-and-Patrol Teams

Presented at the Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems, Budapest, Hungary, July 2010.We identify sustainable sizes for a multi-agent system that consists of two classes of agents: one class is responsible for searching an area; the other for providing perimeter security for that area. In this context, sustainability means the ability of the system to accomplish the task while balancing shared resources. Bio-inspired rules based on the pride structures of African lions are developed to determine the sustainability of a group size

A Hybrid, Multi-Agent Model of Foraging Bottlenose Dolphins

Digital Object Identifier: 10.3182/20090916-3-ES-3003.00046Social behavior of animals can offer solution models for missions involving a large number of heterogeneous vehicles, such as light combat ships, unmanned aerial vehicles, and unmanned underwater vehicles. We draw inspiration from the foraging techniques of bottlenose dolphins to address the problem of heterogeneous multi-agent herding. We produce a hybrid automaton model of the entire foraging method - search, detect, and capture - where agents are modeled as first-order systems in which interactions are defined through spatial proximity. Finally, simulations are provided to illustrate that our model is expressive enough to capture this complex biological phenomenon

Geometric Foraging Strategies in Multi-Agent Systems Based on Biological Models

(c) 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Digital Object Identifier : 10.1109/CDC.2010.5717805In nature, communal hunting is often performed by predators by charging through an aggregation of prey. However, it has been noticed that variations exist in the geometric shape of the charging front; in addition, distinct differences arise between the shapes depending on the particulars of the feeding strategy. For example, each member of a dolphin foraging group must contribute to the hunt and will only be able to eat what it catches. On the other hand, some lions earn a "free lunch" by feigning help and later feasting on the prey caught by the more skilled hunters in the foraging group. We model the charging front of the predators as a curve moving through a prey density modeled as a reaction-diffusion process and we optimize the shape of the charging front in both the free lunch and no-free-lunch cases. These different situations are simulated under a number of varied types of predator-prey interaction models, and connections are made to multi-agent robot systems