Collaborative Research: Mechanical Communication for Multi-agent Systems

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.