Seminar Description
"Self-Organization of Heterogeneous Self-Propelled Particle Swarms"
Dr. Hiroki Sayama
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Bioengineering
Binghamton University, SUNY
March 27, 2008
4:00 pm
101 Perkins Hall
Summary
Self-propelled particle swarm models are computational models of many particles that are capable of autonomous acceleration and local kinetic interaction. Their dynamics have been extensively studied in physics, theoretical biology, and computational science communities because of their useful implications for the understanding of collective behavior of various autonomous agents (e.g., bacteria, fish, birds, pedestrians) as well as their potential of application to practical problem solving. Earlier studies mostly focused on homogeneous swarms, assuming that the same set of kinetic rules uniformly apply to all the particles. Here we extend our scope to heterogeneous swarms in which more than one type of particles can co-exist.
Through extensive computer simulations we studied what kind of patterns/motions could emerge out of the mixtures of multiple types of particles, and found that heterogeneous self-propelled particle swarms usually undergo spontaneous mutual segregation, often leading to the formation of multilayer structures. Driven by their own endogenous forces, the aggregates of particles may additionally show more dynamic macroscopic behaviors, including oscillation, rotation, and linear or even chaotic motion. Interactive evolutionary exploration further revealed the possibility of more complex, even biological-looking structures and behaviors when several different types are mixed. These results suggest a novel direction of understanding and engineering collective behavior of physical agents such as distributed robotic systems.
Speaker Bio
Hiroki Sayama is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Binghamton University, State University of New York. His research interests include complex dynamical networks, collective behaviors, social systems modeling, artificial life/chemistry, mathematical biology, and fundamentals of computation and information theories. He earned his B.Sc. in 1994, his M.Sc. in 1996, and his D.Sc. in 1999, all in Information Science at the University of Tokyo, Japan. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the New England Complex Systems Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1999 to 2002, and was an Assistant/Associate Professor at the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan, from 2002 to 2005. He has published more than 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals and competitive conference proceedings. He is an affiliate of the New England Complex Systems Institute, and a member of IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, ACM, International Society for Artificial Life, and Society for Mathematical Biology. More information about him can be found at his website.
Sponsoring Organizations
Support for this lecture series is provided through the generosity of Professor Richard M. Foote.
