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GRASP Seminar Series: Spring 2005
January 28, 11:00 AM, Levine Hall 315.
Ali Jadbabie
ESE Department, University of Pennsylvania.
Distributed Motion Coordination and Swarming of Mobile Agents: From Flocking to Synchronization of Coupled Oscillators
Abstract: In this talk we provide a unified view of several distributed coordination and flocking algorithms which have appeared in various disciplines such as statistical physics, biology, computer graphics over the past 2 decades. These algorithms have been proposed as a mechanism for demonstrating emergence of collective behavior (such as social aggregation, schooling, flocking and synchronization) using purely local interactions. We will show that these coordination problems, such as Vicsek's model of coordination of self propelled particles in statistical physics, The Reynolds' model of flocking in computer graphics, and the synchronization of coupled nonlinear oscillators (a well-studied problem in dynamical systems, RF electronics and physics), can be all studied and analyzed rigorously under a unified framework of graph theory, duality theory and dynamical systems. Utilizing these results, we provide a biologically plausible, vision-based coordination scheme for flocking and velocity alignment of kinematic agents, which does not require velocity measurements and/or nearest neighbor communication, but instead relies on vision-based sensing. We will show that by sensing the optical flow and time-to-collision between each agent and its neighbors we can achieve coordination, even if the topology of the proximity graph changes with time. Finally, we use the same framework to analyze a recently proposed scheme for geographic routing in wireless adhoc networks which does not rely on location information. (Joint work with Nima Moshtagh, Nader Motee, Bert Tanner, Kostas Daniilidis, and George Pappas.)
Biography: Ali Jadbabaie got his BS with High Honors from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran in 1995. He received his Masters degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1997, and his Ph.D degree in Control and Dynamical Systems from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in December 2000. After spending a year and a half as a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and Yale, he joined the department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor in July 2002. He is a recipient of the NSF Career Award and the ONR Young Investigator Award.
