Models and simulations of collective motion in biomimetic robots and bacteria

In nature, one finds many examples of collective motion, from flocking birds to swarming bees. Any one organism makes its decisions based solely on local information; either it can sense what its close neighbors are doing, or in the case of a single-celled organism, it can sense some local property of its environment. Yet complex global behaviors arise from these local interactions, and these large-scale patterns have neither a leader nor any other centralized control system. In this thesis, two specific cases of collective motion are studied: fish schooling and bacteria swimming across a surface. When fish swim in schools, they swim in the same direction as each other at approximately the same speed. Previous studies of fish have discovered three primary behaviors that, together, lead to large-scale coordination and schooling in the animals. This thesis demonstrates that the same algorithms can be applied to a group of identical underwater robots. If the robots need to coordinate with each other, they can use biomimetic control laws and adopt the interaction algorithms used by fish. A series of simulations are run to see what possible group behaviors can come from these control laws. At a smaller scale, prior experiments have revealed that bacteria and other small organisms also show collective motion.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Cohen, Joanna (Joanna Renee)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Michael S. Triantafyllou and Dick K.P. Yue.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/39872

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/39872