The Cycle of Emergence: Structure, Agency, and the Environment
Abstract
The ultimate goal of this project is to truly harness the power of robotic swarms in military applications. This idea is nothing new,; however, this project will challenge the prevailing paradigm in which specific local interactions are designed with the goal of ma,king a particular `emergent behavior appear. More specifically, this proposal will make an argument for why the current state-of-th,e-art methods used worldwide for designing swarm systems are seriously flawed, and propose an alternative approach and framework to,properly address this. The study of `emergence today is a very imprecise science. Whether you talk to a roboticist, a computer scie,ntist, a biologist, an economist, a philosopher, or a sociologist, the definition and appearance of `emergence can change quite sig,nificantly. Consequently the types of questions, the tools used, and established theories in each field is overly specific to each a,pplication area at hand, yielding a very large and unorganized wealth of knowledge related to `emergence . However, it is an undenia,ble fact that there are many common governing principles that similarly manifest in vastly different applications. Thus, in order to, properly address the problem of how to design intelligent robotic swarm systems, we must first organize and understand the wealth o,f collective knowledge that exists in the world today. This proposal outlines an ambitious, high-risk high-reward project for seekin,g to bring mathematical rigor to these disparate fields of study under a unifying framework. The mathematical methods and tools used, will draw heavily from Cybernetics, Systems, and Control Theory, to bring together ideas from the social sciences and modern manag,ement principles including Realist Social Theory or Viable System Theory. If successful, this project will have implications far bey,ond swarm robotics textbf{by enabling a deeper understanding of the intimate connections between structure, agency, and the environ,ment;} via a more rigorous and methodical manner than is currently done today. As engineers and roboticists worldwide are trying to,harness the power of swarm robotics (e.g., textbf{how can a single person command an entire swarm of robots?}), it is clear there a,re lessons to be learned from the social sciences as there are some common principles across all these domains that should be able t,o provide more insight into ones. How can a single CEO manage an,resident of the United States have over the 320+ million people in the country? How does a flock of birds make collective decisions,without a leader? textbf{What exactly dictates the manifestations of the collective?} This project will help add rigorous definitio,ns and reasoning to these arguments on all sides, with the ultimate goal of fully settling some of these debates through logical rea,soning. At the very least, we propose to formulate a foundational framework for `emergence at a level that researchers in engineeri,ng, computer science, biology, economics, philosophy, sociology, and more will all be able to equally and openly share and discuss t,heir ideas in a manner that provides useful. As this proposal will show, it seems the same things are being rediscovered over and ov,er in different application areas with new names. This project seeks to collect all these ideas under a rigorous, mathematical frame,work to promote the sharing of ideas across disciplines in a meaningful and useful way. The successful completion of this project wi,ll enable researchers to draw from works from very disparate fields to help fill gaps in their own area of research.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 05, 2022
- Source ID
- N000142212207
Entities
People
- Cameron Nowzari
Organizations
- George Mason University
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy