Courant Lectures 2018, Part II
Wednesday, October 17, 2018, 11:15am
Warren Weaver Hall, Room 102
Andrea L. Bertozzi
Professor of Mathematics and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Betsy Wood Knapp Chair for Innovation and Creativity, Director of Applied Mathematics, UCLA
Swarming by Nature and by Design
The cohesive movement of a biological population is a commonly observed natural phenomenon. With the advent of platforms of unmanned vehicles, such phenomena have attracted a renewed interest from the engineering community. This talk will cover a survey of models ranging from aggregation models in nonlinear partial differential equations to control algorithms and robotic testbed experiments. We will show how pairwise potential models are used to study biological movement and how to develop a systematic theory of such models. We also discuss how to use designer potentials to orchestrate cooperative movement in a specific patterns, many of which may not be observed in nature but could be desirable for artificial swarms. Finally we conclude with some recent related work on emotional contagion in crowds and on design algorithms for crop pollination.
Information on past Courant Lectures is available here.