A ocorrência de derrames basálticos continentais assim como enxames de diques a estes relacionados tem sido correlacionada ao impacto de uma pluma mantélica na base da litosfera, ao afinamento crustal e à fragmentação de continentes. Um outro modelo sugere que a ascensão do material magmático ocorre por descontinuidades na litosfera não sendo necessária assim a ocorrência de uma pluma mantélica. Na região entre Resende e a Baía da Ilha Grande, localizada no Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Região Sudeste do Brasil, foram cartografados aproximadamente 140 corpos magmáticos (diques e sills), correlacionados à fragmentação do Gondwana que teve seu ponto máximo a aproximadamente 120 Ma. Estes corpos, em conjunto com outros em outras regiões do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, fazem parte do Enxame de Diques da Serra do Mar. Os corpos cartografados são, em sua maioria, diques e subordinadamente sills que formam três diferentes grupos com base na orientação espacial: NW, NS e NE. A petrografia indicou que estes são formados por basalto, basalto porfirítico, diabásio e micro-gabro sendo a constituição mineralógica formada por fenocristais de olivina, augita e plagioclásio e uma matriz composta por augita, pigeonita, plagioclásio, minerais opacos, apatita, quartzo, clorita e saussurita. Os diques e sills fazem parte de uma série transicional de afinidade toleítica sendo composta por quartzo toleítos classificados como basalto, basalto andesítico, traquibasalto e basalto traquiandesítico. Os toleítos apresentam teores médios de MgO de 4,1% (peso) e teores médios de TiO2 de 3,70% (peso). Com base na razão (La/Yb)n e em outras razões de elementos traços, foi sugerida a ocorrência de três suítes magmáticas distintas: 1) Suíte A (La/Yb)n entre 7,20 e 11; 2) Suíte B (La/Yb)n entre 11,6 e 17,7; 3) Suíte C (La/Yb)n entre 24,8 e 32,6. A análise de diagramas bivariantes, multielementares e de elementos traços, sugriu que o provável processo evolutivo destas suítes foi a cristalização fracionada com o envolvimento de uma fonte do tipo enriquecida com pelo menos uma participação do manto litosférico subcontinental. Análises geocronológicas 40Ar/39Ar dos corpos da área alvo indicaram idades localizadas no intervalo entre 126,34,5 e 155,44,6 Ma, com a distribuição média das idades situada no intervalo entre 134-145 Ma, sendo portanto um pouco mais antigas se comparadas as idades de outras áreas do Enxame de Diques da Serra do Mar. A comparação da orientação espacial dos diques da área alvo com outras áreas do Enxame de Diques da Serra do Mar revelou que somente os diques NE apresentam direções coincidentes tanto com a estruturação do embasamento quanto com a dos outros diques que fazem parte do Enxame. Os corpos com direção NW e NS, abundantes na área alvo são raramente reportados em outras áreas, sugerindo que para área alvo a ocorrência de estruturas NW e NS, como por exemplo falhas e fraturas, exerceram um controle maior no processo de intrusão do que a estruturação NE do embasamento. Em relação a litogeoquímica, as comparações efetuadas com outras área do Enxame de Diques da Serra do Mar e da Província Magmática do Paraná, indicou que este padrão de mais uma suíte magmática é comum em toda área do enxame, porém não são reportadas razões (La/Yb)n tão altas quanto as apresentadas pela Suíte A. Os magmas das suítes da área alvo correlacionam-se algumas vezes com os magmas do tipo Urubici e outras com os do tipo Pitanga podendo ser representante de um tipo hibrido não representado na Província Magmática do Paraná, mas que seria semelhante ao magma do tipo Paraíba encontrado no Enxame de Diques da Serra do Mar. As idades mais antigas que a média normalmente encontrada para os diques que fazem parte do Enxame de Diques da Serra do Mar sugere que processos distensionais associados à fragmentação do Gondwana já estariam atuando na região sudeste do Brasil há pelo menos 150 Ma. / Continental flood basalts and Dike Swarms usually are correlated with the impact of a mantle plume at the base of the lithosphere and continental break-up. In the area located between Resende and Ilha Grande Bay, Rio de Janeiro State, southeast of Brazil, approximately 170 igneous rocks bodies (dikes and sills) were mapped and are correlated with the Gondwana break-up 120 My. The dikes and sills are part of the Serra do Mar Dike Swarm which occur in the coastline and interior areas of the Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo State. The basement rocks are Precambrian gneiss. These magmatic bodies are mostly dikes and few sills, and were divided in three groups based on orientation: NW, NS and NE. Petrography showed that these bodies are basalts, porphiritic basalts, diabases and gabbros. Their mineralogy includes olivine, augite and plagioclase, as phenocrysts, and augite, pigeonite, plagioclase, opaque minerals, apatite, quartz, chlorite and saussurite, as groundmass. These rocks are part of a tholeiitic transitional magmatic serie, classified as basalts, trachy basalts, basaltic trachyandesites and basaltic andesite. The MgO average in these rocks is 4.1 % and they were classified as high-TiO2 (average of 3.70%). Based on (La/Yb)n, samples are separated in 3 groups: 1) Suite A (La/Yb)n between 7,20 e 11; 2) Suite B (La/Yb)n between 11,6 e 17,7; 3) Suíte C (La/Yb)n between 24,8 e 32,6. Fractional crystallization with sublithospheric mantle source is the most probable evolutive process for those dikes. Comparison between these dikes and Paraná Magmatic Province indicates that the tholeiitic basalts in this work area are similar to Urubici and Pitanga magmas and also similar to Paraíba magma in the other areas of Serra do Mar Dike Swarm. 40Ar/39Ar geochronology for these rocks reveled ages between 126, 3 4,5 and 155,4 4,6 Ma. Clustering is in the interval between 134 145 Ma. The comparison of spatial orientation, geochemistry and geochronology data with other areas, suggests that distensive process started at 150Ma in the southeast region of Brazil before the Gondwana break-up.

abstract: Existing robotic excavation research has been primarily focused on lunar mining missions or simple traffic control in confined tunnels, however little work attempts to bring collective excavation into the realm of human infrastructure. This thesis explores a decentralized approach to excavation processes, where traffic laws are borrowed from swarms of fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) or termites (Coptotermes formosanus) to create decision rules for a swarm of robots working together and organizing effectively to create a desired final excavated pattern. First, a literature review of the behavioral rules of different types of insect colonies and the resulting structural patterns over the course of excavation was conducted. After identifying pertinent excavation laws, three different finite state machines were generated that relate to construction, search and rescue operations, and extraterrestrial exploration. After analyzing these finite state machines, it became apparent that they all shared a common controller. Then, agent-based NetLogo software was used to simulate a swarm of agents that run this controller, and a model for excavating behaviors and patterns was fit to the simulation data. This model predicts the tunnel shapes formed in the simulation as a function of the swarm size and a time delay, called the critical waiting period, in one of the state transitions. Thus, by controlling the individual agents' behavior, it was possible to control the structural outcomes of collective excavation in simulation. To create an experimental testbed that could be used to physically implement the controller, a small foldable robotic platform was developed, and it's capabilities were tested in granular media. In order to characterize the granular media, force experiments were conducted and parameters were measured for resistive forces during an excavation cycle. The final experiment verified the robot's ability to engage in excavation and deposition, and to determine whether or not to begin the critical waiting period. This testbed can be expanded with multiple robots to conduct small-scale experiments on collective excavation, such as further exploring the effects of the critical waiting period on the resulting excavation pattern. In addition, investigating other factors like tuning digging efficiency or deposition proximity could help to transition the proposed bio-inspired swarm excavation controllers to implementation in real-world applications. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Mechanical Engineering 2018

"I daresay you haven’t had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There[21]. This thesis examines an artificial proto-culture of e-Puck robots to examine which factors affect the transmission of memes, in the form of sounds imitated back and forth between the robots, to determine which factors promote or inhibit meme diversity and spread. Meme theory posits that the development of cultural artifacts such as ideas, myths, religions, etc. arises naturally from cultural information transfer by imitation. It has been suggested that 'copybots’, robots programmed to imitate each other, would eventually lead to the emergence of something recognizable as culture[13]. This thesis describes part of a research project which sought to use e-Puck robots to implement a copybot based system to examine this proto-culture emergence. The group implemented an Artificial Culture lab for experiments using the e-Puck robots. Here the focus is on the imitation of sound patterns (the memes) within a group of e-Pucks to examine which factors promote or inhibit meme diversity and spread. Other parts of the research group examined the imitation of movement patterns, human perceptions (and preconceptions of robots), and abstract societal level modeling. Within is described a simulator and a series of experiments on the imitation of sounds using that simulator that examine the factors affecting meme transmission in homogeneous populations and evolving heterogeneous populations. These experiments show that they key factor in promoting meme diversity and spread is simply the frequency with which imitation occurs. They also show that memory size plays a smaller role and selection strategy (for choosing which meme to imitate) plays a lesser role still. "If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe." Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe[1].

M.Sc. (Information Technology) / A new particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm that produces solutions to the xed spectrum frequency assignment problem (FS-FAP) is presented. Solutions to the FS-FAP are used to allocate frequencies in a mobile telecommunications network and must have low interference. The standard PSO algorithm's velocity method and global selection is ill suited for the frequency assignment problem (FAP). Therefore using the standard PSO algorithm as base, new techniques are developed to allow it to operate on the FAP. The new techniques include two velocity methods and three global selection schemes. This study presents the results of the algorithm operating on the Siemens set of COST 259 problems and shows that it is viable applying the PSO to the FAP.

Many scientific, engineering and economic problems involve the optimisation of a set of parameters. These problems include examples like minimising the losses in a power grid by finding the optimal configuration of the components, or training a neural network to recognise images of people's faces. Numerous optimisation algorithms have been proposed to solve these problems, with varying degrees of success. The Particle Swarm Optimiser (PSO) is a relatively new technique that has been empirically shown to perform well on many of these optimisation problems. This thesis presents a theoretical model that can be used to describe the long-term behaviour of the algorithm. An enhanced version of the Particle Swarm Optimiser is constructed and shown to have guaranteed convergence on local minima. This algorithm is extended further, resulting in an algorithm with guaranteed convergence on global minima. A model for constructing cooperative PSO algorithms is developed, resulting in the introduction of two new PSO-based algorithms. Empirical results are presented to support the theoretical properties predicted by the various models, using synthetic benchmark functions to investigate specific properties. The various PSO-based algorithms are then applied to the task of training neural networks, corroborating the results obtained on the synthetic benchmark functions. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Computer Science / Unrestricted

Evolutionary algorithms and swarm intelligence techniques have been shown to successfully solve optimization problems where the goal is to find a single optimal solution. In multimodal domains where the goal is the locate multiple solutions in a single search space, these techniques fail. Niching algorithms extend existing global optimization algorithms to locate and maintain multiple solutions concurrently. In this thesis, strategies are developed that utilize the unique characteristics of the particle swarm optimization algorithm to perform niching. Shrinking topological neighborhoods and optimization with multiple subswarms are used to identify and stably maintain niches. Solving systems of equations and multimodal functions are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new algorithms. / Dissertation (MS)--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Computer Science / unrestricted

This thesis describes the development and experimental results of a system to explore cloning of facial expressions between dissimilar face models, so new faces can be animated using the animations from existing faces. The system described in this thesis uses fuzzy membership functions and subtractive clustering to represent faces and expressions in an intermediate space. This intermediate space allows expressions for face models with different resolutions to be compared. The algorithm is trained for each pair of faces using particle swarm optimization, which selects appropriate weights and radii to construct the intermediate space. These techniques allow the described system to be more flexible than previous systems, since it does not require prior knowledge of the underlying implementation of the face models to function.

Optimization forms an intrinsic part of the design and implementation of modern systems, such as industrial systems, communication networks, and the configuration of electric or electronic components. Population-based single-solution optimization algorithms such as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) have been shown to perform well when a number of optimal or suboptimal solutions exist. However, some problems require algorithms that locate all or most of these optimal and suboptimal solutions. Such algorithms are known as niching or speciation algorithms. Several techniques have been proposed to extend the PSO paradigm so that multiple optima can be located and maintained within a convoluted search space. A significant number of these implementations are subswarm-based, that is, portions of the swarm are optimized separately. Niches are formed to contain these subswarms, a process that often requires user-specified parameters, as the sizes and placing of the niches are unknown. This thesis presents a new niching technique that uses the vector dot product of the social and cognitive direction vectors to determine niche boundaries. Thus, a separate niche radius is calculated for each niche, a process that requires minimal knowledge of the search space. This strategy differs from other techniques using niche radii where a niche radius is either required to be set in advance, or calculated from the distances between particles. The development of the algorithm is traced and tested extensively using synthetic benchmark functions. Empirical results are reported using a variety of settings. An analysis of the algorithm is presented as well as a scalability study. The performance of the algorithm is also compared to that of two other well-known PSO niching algorithms. To conclude, the vector-based PSO is extended to locate and track multiple optima in dynamic environments. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Computer Science / unrestricted

The purpose of this thesis was to identify the optimal design parameters for a jet nozzle which obtains a local maximum shear stress while maximizing the average shear stress on the floor of a fluid filled system. This research examined how geometric parameters of a jet nozzle, such as the nozzle's angle, height, and orifice, influence the shear stress created on the bottom surface of a tank. Simulations were run using a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software package to determine shear stress values for a parameterized geometric domain including the jet nozzle. A response surface was created based on the shear stress values obtained from 112 simulated designs. A multi-objective optimization software utilized the response surface to generate designs with the best combination of parameters to achieve maximum shear stress and maximum average shear stress. The optimal configuration of parameters achieved larger shear stress values over a commercially available design.

This thesis is focused on realization of the swarm intelligence experiments in the simulation software Vortex and MRDS. The aim is to decide whether the achieved results meet the theoretical expectations based on the published experiment.