Title: Advanced control for active colloids inspired by swarm robotics
Abstract: Advanced applications for materials composed of active colloids in photonics, tissue engineering, nanorobotics, and biomedicine require spatiotemporal control of a large number of particles. One way to achieve control combines external computing and particle tracking (using microscopy) with top-down control of particles (e.g., with electrophoresis or optical tweezers). Unfortunately, these methods are not easily scalable to the number of particles needed for many applications. Alternatively, we explore how concepts and algorithms from the literature on macroscale swarm robotics (e.g., drones) can apply to colloidal active particles. Specifically, we focus on a model system that we label the Active Brownian Unicycle (ABU) model that generalizes the equation of motion for both active colloids and swarms of drones. We use this model to show that algorithms and methods developed for macroscale robotic swarms can be successfully applied to control the swarm behavior of microscale active particles.
Bio: Douglas Tree is an Associate Professor (2017-present) in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Brigham Young University. He received a B.S. from BYU in 2009 and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 2014 (advisor: Kevin Dorfman), both in Chemical Engineering, followed by postdoctoral research (2014-2017) with Glenn Fredrickson in the Materials Research Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on theory and simulation problems related to the dynamics of multiphase soft materials (e.g., biopolymers/DNA, nonsolvent-induced phase separation, polymer crystallization, phase field models, advanced sampling free energy methods, diffusiophoresis, active particles, reactive self-assembly, molten salt electrochemistry). Recent awards include an NSF CAREER award, an ACS PRF New Investigator Grant, and a Soft Matter Emerging Investigator award.