Tuesday: regression testing …

Today started to analyse area results, finding the following sites useful:

• http://www.jeremymiles.co.uk/regressionbook/extras/appendix2/R/
• http://www.jeremymiles.co.uk/regressionbook/extras/appendix2/excel/
  http://www.statmethods.net/stats/regression.html

Now just need to try and work out how to lay out the information correctly to allow the analysis to work correctly. Time is the independent variable and area is the dependent variable … but I have multiple experimental parameters in the background. I don’t receive a single outcome of “10″ but continued variation. What to do?

Thursday: additional reading about flocking …

Found 2 thesises of use:

Maja Mataric — Interaction and intelligent behavior http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7343 (advisor: Rodney Brookes)

• “Like following, flocking is a coordinated{motion behavior which is best evaluated by testing its duration, repeatability and robustness”
• see Darley 1994 ref, about Emergence
• look at p51 – at the bottom, lots to do with swarm intelligence – and p52, see Assad and Packard 1992 ref and Hogeweg and Hesper (1985) who did simulations of simple organisms forming complex behaviours from simple iteractions
• p99 flocking definition
• stability definition in section 4.1, plus notation explanation
• see p110 for refs — DeScnutter & Nuyts (1993) and Goss, Deneubourg, Beckers & Henrotte (1993) show a similar approach by demonstrating how simple rules can result in gull flock formation in simulation
• see page 62 for refs — misc. on gulls (Camazine (1993))
• look out for this: Mataric, Maja J., “From Flocks of Birds to Robot Herds: Synthesizing Robot Teams and Swarms”,  MIT Press, to be published in 2009.

Adam Thomas Hayes —  Self-Organized Robotic System Design and Autonomous Odor Localization http://etd.caltech.edu/etd/available/etd-06112002-132034/ (Advisor: Richard Murray)

• still going through !

Wednesday: reading about flocking analysis …

… and it hasn’t been very successful. Using Athens’ Dissertation and Thesis finder:

 

Nopes
~~~~~
- Decision and control in distributed cooperative systems by Ballal, Prasanna Mohan, Ph.D., The University of Texas at Arlington, 2008, 164 pages; AAT 3320054 (Adv. Lewis, Frank L.)
- Coordination, consensus and communication in multi-robot control systems by Speranzon, Alberto, Ph.D., Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan (Sweden), 2006, 138 pages; AAT C825876
- Coordination of distributed autonomous systems by Lin, Jie, Ph.D., Yale University, 2004, 145 pages; AAT 3152954 (Adv. Morse, A. Stephen)
- Automatic program generation based on the swarm (by Charnecki, Timothy A., M.S., Utah State University, 2004, 57 pages; AAT 1424551) — doesn’t seem to have any analysis on the swarm
- Enhancing genetic programming through the application of swarm principles (by Visser, John B., M.S., Utah State University, 2005, 55 pages; AAT 1431749) — again, no analysis
- An analysis of particle swarm optimizers (by van den Bergh, Frans, Ph.D., University of Pretoria (South Africa), 2002; AAT 0804353) — hmmm, not sure

Maybes
~~~~~~
- M. Lindhé, P. Ögren, and K. H. Johansson. Flocking with obstacle avoidance: A new distributed coordination algorithm based on voronoi partitions. In In Proceedings of IEEE ICRA, 2005. — maybe Karl Henrik Johansson, http://www.s3.kth.se/~kallej/
- Reza Olfati Saber and Richard M. Murray. Flocking with obstacle avoidance: Cooperation with limited communication in mobile networks. In submitted to IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2003 — http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~Reza_Olfati_Saber/papers/flocking_tac06.pdf

Could not find’s
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- Passivity and time-scale decomposition techniques for nonlinear multi-agent coordination by Biyik, Emrah, Ph.D., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2007, 87 pages; AAT 3299444 (Adv. Arcak, Murat)
- Contraction and partial contraction: A study of synchronization in nonlinear networks by Wang, Wei, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005; AAT 0807895 (Adv. Slotine, Jean-Jacques E.) <Wang, W., and Slotine, J.J.E., “Contraction Analysis of Time-Delayed Communications and Group Cooperation,” I.E.E.E. Transactions on Automatic Control, 51(4), 2006. >

Do nexts
~~~~~~~~
- Self-organized robotic system design and autonomous odor localization by Hayes, Adam Thomas, Ph.D., California Institute of Technology, 2002, 141 pages; AAT 3046706 (Adv. Murray, Richard)
- Tanner ?
- Richard M Murray

Wednesday: creating area output files …

Have created the output files from data run — 2 hours of pain with Python figuring out a few annoyances, but there now.

Now need to stick data into R and produce nice graphs !