Modeling and Control in Social Dynamics

Eulerian Swarms

Magnus Egerstedt

Georgia Institute of Technology

The traditional approach to controlling multi-robot systems is to view the individual robots as agents, whose dynamics are to be controlled; autonomously or through human inputs. This can be thought of as following the Lagrangian program in fluid-dynamics, where the movements of individual particles are characterized. In this talk, we contrast this with the “Eulerian” approach, whereby individual robots do not matter. Instead, what is characterized and manipulated are overall robot “flows” or “densities”, which gives human operators the ability to control the multi-robot system without having to worry about the motions of individual robots.