While swarms that execute decisions are well known in the swarm community, swarms that exhibit this capability a priori have never before been achieved. We demonstrate a methodology, based on the Hamiltonian method of swarm design, that enables the design and implementation of swarms that exhibit decision-making capability. We develop the theoretical structure of the method and apply it to the ...

Robot swarms provide interesting and potentially very useful examples of self-organizing systems. This chapter focuses on a specific approach, dubbed “active self-assembly”, for constructing arbitrary shapeswith swarms of identical and identically programmed robots. Important, open issues are identified in the specific context of active self-assembly, but they are of more general applicability....

Swarms are a metaphor for complex dynamic systems. In swarms, large numbers of individuals locally interact and form non-linear, dynamic interaction networks. Ants, wasps and termites, for instance, are natural swarms whose individual and group behaviors have been evolving over millions of years. In their intricate nest constructions, the emergent effectiveness of their behaviors becomes appare...

Locust Swarms are a recently-developed multi-optima particle swarm. To test the potential of the new technique, they have been applied to the 1000-dimension optimization problems used in the recent CEC2008 Large Scale Global Optimization competition. The results for Locust Swarms are competitive on these problems, and in particular, much better than other particle swarm-based techniques. An ana...

Distributed motion control of robotic swarms has been receiving increased attention due to their potential for application in many domains including emergency response and remote sensing and exploration. A challenging aspect of motion control for swarms is enabling them to move past large obstacles without losing global connectivity. In this paper we present a novel motion primitive for swarms ...

Improved recovery of the spatial variability in the effective elastic thickness, Te, of the lithosphere is important to interpret Earth’s structure and geodynamics. Here we use synthetic topography and gravity data to systematically compare the recovery of Te using the multitaper windowing scheme of Pérez-Gussinyé et al. (2004, 2007) with the wavelet approach of Kirby and Swain (2008a). We find...

A careful analysis of low-frequency seismic events on Soufrièere Hills volcano, Montserrat, points to a source mechanism that is non-destructive, repetitive, and has a stationary source location. By combining these seismological clues with new field evidence and numerical magma flow modelling, we propose a seismic trigger model which is based on brittle failure of magma in the glass transition....

[1] Observations of volcanoes extruding andesitic lava to produce lava domes often reveal cyclic behavior. At Soufrière Hills Volcano, Montserrat, cycles with subdaily and multiweek periods have been recognized on many occasions. Observations clearly show that the period of subdaily cycles is modulated by the multiweek cycle. The subdaily and multiweek cycles have been modeled separately as sti...