Collaborative Research: Mechanical Communication for Multi-agent Systems

鱼群游动可以利用与邻居诱导的水流的流体动力学相互作用。大肠杆菌利用鞭毛分泌并推动周围介质，使其在群体中蜿蜒游动，心脏细胞对其弹性环境施加力以影响细胞迁移。这些多主体生物系统中的每一个都提供了一个例子，其中，浸泡在共同介质（流体或弹性基质）中的相似体之间的低级相互作用产生了集体行为。例如，鱼群中的鱼将动量（信息传递）传递给周围的流体（信息流），相邻的鱼感受到由此产生的可能影响运动的物理变化（信息被接收）。我们把通过环境媒介传递信息的机制称为机械传播。在这里，信息流以环境动态的形式具有自身的动态性。然而，目前尚不清楚个体如何控制它们的运动以从这种机械交流中获益。该项目将通过理论分析和移动机器人车辆的台式实验相结合来解决这一挑战。这个项目的重点是关节机器人的机械通信，主动或被动地改变其内部形状，同时移动和通信。在这种多智能体系统中，个体智能体如何在运动和机械通信之间进行权衡是这项工作的主要动机。为了解决这个问题，信息交换将被分成三个关键块：发送、接收和移动。在这样做的过程中，这项工作试图回答一个系统是如何：1)移动传输信息？2)传递信息诱导运动？3)移动接收信息？4)接收信息诱导运动？这项工作的重点是了解机械耦合和非运动信息交换如何影响这些问题。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Fish swimming in schools could exploit hydrodynamic interactions with neighbor-induced flows. E coli bacteria secrete and push against a surrounding medium using flagella to meander in swarms, and cardiac cells exert forces on their elastic environments to influence cell migration. Each of these multi-agent biological systems provides an example wherein a collective behavior emerges from low-level interactions between similar bodies immersed in a common medium, either fluid or elastic substrate. For example, fish in a school impart momentum (information is transmitted) into their surrounding fluid (information flows) and the neighboring fish feel resultant physical changes that may impact locomotion (information is received). We term the mechanism for information transfer through ambient media mechanical communication. Here, information flow possesses dynamics of its own in the form of environment dynamics. However, it is not clear how individual agents should control their movement to benefit from this mechanical communication. This project will address this challenge through a combination of theoretical analysis and benchtop experiments with mobile robotic vehicles. This project focuses on mechanical communication for articulated robots that actively or passively change their internal shape to simultaneously locomote and communicate. How individual agents within such multi-agent systems tradeoff between locomotion and mechanical communication is a prime motivator of the work. To address this tradeoff, exchange of information will be separated into three key blocks: transmit, receive, and locomote. In doing so, the work seeks to answer how does a system: 1) Locomote to transmit information? 2) Transmit information to induce locomotion? 3) Locomote to receive information? 4) Receive information to induce locomotion? A focus of this work is to understand how mechanical coupling and non-locomoting information exchange impact these questions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.