Friday, October 27, 2017, 3pm
Location: Planetary Hall Room 126
Ira Schwartz
Naval Research Laboratory
Washington, DC
Pattern
Forming Swarms and the Physics of Mixed Reality
Abstract
With the availability of ever more cheap and powerful
computing, interest in the use of augmented and mixed-reality
experiments has grown considerably in the engineering and physical
sciences. Broadly speaking, these experiments consist of a simulated,
or virtual model coupled directly to a physical experiment. Within the
physical experiment, it is typical to find a good deal of uncertainty
and noise since it is connected to the real world, and thus subjected
to random perturbations. In contrast, the virtual part of the coupled
system represents a somewhat idealized version of reality in which
noise can be eliminated entirely, or at least well characterized. Thus,
mixed-reality systems have very skewed sources of uncertainty spread
through the entire system.
In this talk, we consider the pattern formation of delay - coupled
swarms theoretically and experimentally to illustrate the idea of
mixed-reality. Motivated by physical experiments, we then consider a
generic model of a mixed-reality system, and show how noise in the
physical part of the system can influence the virtual dynamics through
a large fluctuation, even when there is no noise in the virtual
components. The virtual large fluctuation happens while the real
dynamics exhibits only small random oscillations. We quantify the
effects of uncertainty by showing how characteristic timescales of
noise induced switching scale as a function of the coupling between the
real and virtual parts of the experiment.
This work is done in collaboration with Klimka Szwaykowska, Thomas
Carr, and Jason Hindes.