Block Island Workshop on Cooperative Control. To be Held at the Spring House Hotel in Block Island, Rhode Island.

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

The purpose of this proposal is to request funds from the National Science Foundation in partial support of the forthcoming Block Island Workshop on Cooperative Control which is scheduled to take place on June 10 and 11, 2003 at the Spring House Hotel on Block Island, Rhode Island. The primary objective of this workshop is to bring together a small number of individuals from such fields as animal biology, robotics, automatic control, communications and sensor networks, artificial intelligence, dynamical systems, algorithms, etc. with interests in group coordination and cooperative control not primarily to present their current work, but rather to delineate common ground and to identify fundamental unresolved problems in the rapidly evolving, cross-disciplinary field of cooperative control of natural and man-made groups. Intellectual Merit: In recent years, there has been a growing interest in understanding on the one hand, how various animal aggregations such as fish schools, bird ocks, deer herds, etc. coordinate their collective motions to perform useful tasks and on the other, how groups of mobile autonomous agents such as AUV schools, UAV ocks, etc., might be instructed to cooperate in a similar man-ner. In ecology and evolutionary biology, for example, it is of great interest to understand how natural groupings coordinate themselves and move so awlessly, often without an apparent leader or any form of centralized control. What kinds of signaling must they use? What role if any, does the physical medium, environmental context, currents, vortices, or other local environmental disturbances play in this process? Are there universal principles of coordinated group motion and if so what might they be? Could such principles be used in a robotic context to help enable a large group of autonomously functioning vehicles in the air, on land or sea or underwater, to collectively accomplish, in a safe and coordinated manner, useful tasks such as distributed, adaptive scientific data gathering, search and rescue, and reconnaissance? In broad terms, these are the questions to which this workshop is addressed. Broader Impacts: This workshop will advance discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training and learning by including student participation at the workshop. The work-shop will broaden participation of under-represented groups by encouraging such individuals to actively participate in the workshop. Without question, this highly interdisciplinary meeting will enhance infrastructure for research and education by significantly increasing the potential for cross-disciplinary research among participants and between parent institutions. The workshop will broaden dissemination to enhance scientific and technological understanding by means of a published proceedings and well as by consequential presentations and publications to a wide semi-technical community.