Workshop on Nanosensors: Self-Organization and Swarm Robotics

Title: Harnessing the Swarm – From Ants to Robots (Welcome) Speaker: Sanjay Goel Affiliation: University at Albany, SUNY (UAlbany) Abstract: The dream of having smart dust is finally within reach with the arrival of nano-technology. To realize these drams, however, we need to address several fundamental issues. Despite miniaturization of sensors, the limitations on power and communication remain. Expecting an independent power source and long range communication for each sensor is neither feasible, nor possible with current technology. Self-organization, however, holds promise in making networking of sensors feasible. Self-organization has been studied in several domains such as, social insects, physics, and ... We need to draw from all of these fields. Theories of self-organization have been attempted using Kolmogorov Complexity, statistical mechanics, and cellular automata for specific domains; however, we still lack a universal theory of self-organization. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different domains and build an understanding of the role of self-organization in sensors. We want to start a dialogue and perhaps begin to collaborate to make advances in nano-sensor communication and selforganization. Our long term goal is to develop a universal theory of self-organization. We have worked on developing optimization algorithms using cellular automata. I am currently working on problems in nano-sensors as well as transportation using self-organization algorithms.