Browsing by Subject "Collective behavior"

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A Theory of the Critical Mass. I. : Interdependence, Group Heterogencity, and the Production of Collective Action
(1985) Teixeira, Ruy
Open Access
Autonomous navigation of robotic units in mobile sensor network
(2012) Nazlibilek, S.
This work is motivated by the problem of detecting buried anti-tank and anti-personnel mines in roads or some border regions. The problem is tried to be solved by use of small mobile robotic sensors and their some abilities such as measurement of local fields, navigation around a region, communications with each other, and constituting team within a mission area. The aim of this work is to investigate the navigation problem for the team behavior of mobile sensors within a potential field available in a small-scale environment such as an indoor area or an outdoor region. The mobile sensor network here is a collection of robotic units with sensing capability of earth magnetic field anomalies. A new kind of positioning system is needed for their collective behavior. In this work, a new method of navigation is proposed as a local positioning system. It utilizes ultrasound and radio frequency information to determine the coordinates of the points inside the operational area. The method proposed here is compared with the ultra wideband ranging ping-pong method that is used widely in recent applications. A time division multiple access method is used for the communications among the mobile sensors. The results on the positioning methods together with several simulations and experimental works are given. It is shown that the positioning method utilizing ultrasound-radio frequency method can give fairly good results. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Open Access
Engineering sensorial delay to control phototaxis and emergent collective behaviors
(American Physical Society, 2016-01) Mijalkov, M.; McDaniel, A.; Wehr, J.; Volpe, G.
Collective motions emerging from the interaction of autonomous mobile individuals play a key role in many phenomena, from the growth of bacterial colonies to the coordination of robotic swarms. For these collective behaviors to take hold, the individuals must be able to emit, sense, and react to signals. When dealing with simple organisms and robots, these signals are necessarily very elementary; e.g., a cell might signal its presence by releasing chemicals and a robot by shining light. An additional challenge arises because the motion of the individuals is often noisy; e.g., the orientation of cells can be altered by Brownian motion and that of robots by an uneven terrain. Therefore, the emphasis is on achieving complex and tunable behaviors fromsimple autonomous agents communicating with each other in robust ways. Here, we show that the delay between sensing and reacting to a signal can determine the individual and collective long-term behavior of autonomous agents whose motion is intrinsically noisy. We experimentally demonstrate that the collective behavior of a group of phototactic robots capable of emitting a radially decaying light field can be tuned from segregation to aggregation and clustering by controlling the delay with which they change their propulsion speed in response to the light intensity they measure. We track this transition to the underlying dynamics of this system, in particular, to the ratio between the robots' sensorial delay time and the characteristic time of the robots' random reorientation. Supported by numerics, we discuss how the same mechanism can be applied to control active agents, e.g., airborne drones, moving in a three-dimensional space. Given the simplicity of this mechanism, the engineering of sensorial delay provides a potentially powerful tool to engineer and dynamically tune the behavior of large ensembles of autonomous mobile agents; furthermore, this mechanism might already be at work within living organisms such as chemotactic cells.