| Time: | December 13, 2024 |
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Prof. Naomi E. Leonard
Faculty of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ, USA
Friday 2024-12-13 2 p.m.
IST Seminar Room 2.255 - Pfaffenwaldring 9 - Campus Stuttgart-Vaihingen
Abstract
I will introduce Excitable Nonlinear Opinion Dynamics (E-NOD), which enable decision-making and control with superior “agility” in responding to and adapting to fast and unpredictable changes in context, environment, or information received about available options. ENOD derives through the introduction of a single extra term to the previously presented Nonlinear Opinion Dynamics (NOD), which have been shown to provide fast and flexible multiagent behavior. The extra term is inspired by the fast-positive, slow-negative mixed-feedback structure of excitable systems. The agile behaviors brought about by the new excitable nature of decision-making driven by E-NOD are analyzed in a general setting and illustrated in applications to robot navigation around human movers and to control of soft robotics.
Biographical Information
Naomi Ehrich Leonard is Chair and Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. She is associated faculty with the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics and the Biophysics Graduate Program, and affiliated faculty with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. She is Founding Director of CreativeX, a Princeton engineering-and-the-arts collective, and Founding Editor of Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems. Leonard received her B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the ASME, IEEE, IFAC, and SIAM. Recent awards include the 2023 IEEE Control Systems Award and the 2024 Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award.
Leonard's background includes feedback control theory, nonlinear dynamics, geometric mechanics, and robotics, where she has contributed to theory and application. She studies and designs complex, dynamical systems comprised of many interacting agents, such as animals, humans, and autonomous vehicles, that move, sense, and decide together. She develops analytically tractable mathematical models of collective dynamics that provide the systematic means to examine the role of feedback, interconnection, and individual differences in the behavior, learning, and resilience of groups in changing environments. Leonard’s collaborators have included researchers in oceanography, ecology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and political science, and artists.