Cells and Robots: Modeling and Control of Large-Size Agent Populations (Dejan L.J. Milutinovic and P. Lima; 2007) [Book Review]

The book introduces a hybrid dynamical modeling framework for modeling both the discrete population dynamics as well as the distribution of the swarm in a continuous state space. Some of the topics covered include: the analogy between an individual robot and a cell in terms of sensors and actuators and the analogy between the immune system and T-cell receptor dynamics; and a system of partial differential equations (PDEs) that describe the change of the continuous distribution of each discrete state as a function of both the state transition probabilities between discrete states and the vector fields that affect the continuous state distributions. The book is recommended to anyone who is interested in a probabilistic perspective on modeling large-scale distributed systems.