Pursuit and Cohesion

P. S. Krishnaprasad
University of Maryland

Monday, October 20, 2008 at 1:00PM

54-134 Engineering IV Building
Refreshments Served

Abstract:Pursuit phenomena in nature have a vital role in survival of species. In addition to prey-capture and mating behavior, pursuit phenomena appear to underlie territorial battles in certain species of insects. In this talk we discuss geometric patterns associated to pursuit, and suggest sensorimotor feedback laws that explain such patterns. Among mammals, the echolocating FM bat navigates in the dark using primarily the information it gathers by probing the environment through pulses of frequency modulated ultrasound. The effectiveness of the bat in coping with, attenuation and noise, uncertainty of the environment, and sensorimotor delay, makes it a most interesting model system for engineers concerned with goal-directed and resource-constrained signal processing in robotics. We will discuss the prey capture strategy that appears to be preferred by the bat and compare it with alternatives using an evolutionary game theoretic setting. The formalism of information geometry and dynamics on the probability simplex provide tools to analyze these results.

From technological and biological perspectives, one may consider pursuit mechanisms as essential building blocks for the realization of coherent structures (flocks, schools, swarms). In this context, we show that structures from Hamiltonian mechanics are of interest.

Biography: P. S. Krishnaprasad received the Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 1977. He taught in the Systems Engineering Department at Case Western Reserve University from 1977 to 1980. Since August 1980, he has been with the University of Maryland, where he now holds the position of Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, with a joint appointment at the Institute for Systems Research. He has held short and long term visiting positions at Erasmus University, the University of Groningen, the University of California Berkeley, Cornell University, and Princeton University. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1990 and received the 2007 Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize. His interests lie in the broad areas of geometric control, filtering and signal processing theory, robotics, acoustics, and biologically-inspired approaches to control, sensing and computation. He has made contributions to system identification, geometric mechanics, actuation based on smart materials, and control of collectives.