I have developed a new web application called Scholarnaut, which provides an interactive map of research themes and connections over time. It pulls directly from Google Scholar profiles. A static option is available for simple website integration. Demo for my Google Scholar profile is available here. Repo is available on here.
Emergent homeomorphic curves in swarms This work introduces the concept of geometric embeddings, which permit the application of linear control policies to produce globally-stable emergent curves in swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles. The vehicles make decisions based only on local observations, without knowing their role in the larger group. Below is an animation of the technique being used to produce a lemniscatic arc. Article available here. Code available here. ...
One of our grad students (Dimitria) recently presented findings at the 2024 IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering (ISSE) in Perugia, Italy. This new work builds off some of our earlier investigations into emergent leminscate traectories by providing a more general solution, applicable to a wide range of closed-curve trajectories. Abstract This work investigates the self-organization of multi-agent systems into closed trajectories, a common requirement in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) surveillance tasks. In such scenarios, smooth, unbiased control signals save energy and mitigate mechanical strain. We propose a decentralized control system architecture that produces a globally stable emergent structure from local observations only; there is no requirement for agents to share a global plan or follow prescribed trajectories. Central to our approach is the formulation of an injective virtual embedding induced by rotations from the actual agent positions. This embedding serves as a structure-preserving map around which all agent stabilize their relative positions and permits the use of well-established linear control techniques. We construct the embedding such that it is topologically equivalent to the desired trajectory (i.e., a homeomorphism), thereby preserving the stability characteristics. We demonstrate the versatility of this approach through implementation on a swarm of Quanser QDrone quadcopters. Results demonstrate the quadcopters self-organize into the desired trajectory while maintaining even separation. ...