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Improving Safety Through Biologically Inspired Design Could nature hold the key to infrastructure resilience? Dr. Bryan Watson, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is betting on it. Watson, who directs Embry-Riddle’s Biologically Inspired Design-for-Resilience Lab, believes natural systems hold the key to engineering safer, more secure multi-agent networks. A $200,000 Engineering Research Initiation (ERI) grant from the NSF will enable Watson to explore this idea over a two-year period. Multi-agent systems like drone swarms are important to national defense, but they can be vulnerable to threats. Watson and his students will model the spread of cuticular hydrocarbon in ant colonies to learn how ants identify intruders and mitigate their impacts. Then, Watson’s team will develop a faulted agent detection algorithm and test it via simulations and a real-world robotic swarm. The outcome? A new approach to systems resilience that is decentralized, scalable and can be implemented without onboard machine learning. ERI grants are awarded to new academic researchers who show significant promise and the ability to contribute to America’s engineering research capacity. Watson is also the recipient of a College of Engineering seed grant, is the college’s 2024 Teacher of the Year and is 2024 Embry-Riddle Research Mentor of the Year.
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