University Calendar

The presentation provides an overview of two different prongs of my research program.

1. Tracking Coherent Structures: There has been a steady increase in the deployment of autonomous underwater and surface vehicles for applications such as ocean monitoring, tracking of marine processes, and forecasting contaminant transport. The underwater environment poses unique challenges since robots must operate in a communication and localizationSlimited environment where their dynamics are tightly coupled with the environmental dynamics. This work presents current efforts in understanding the impact of geophysical fluid dynamics on underwater vehicle control and autonomy. The focus is on the use of collaborative vehicles to track Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCS). A control strategy is formulated that utilizes knowledge of the LCS and enables mobile sensors to autonomously maintain a desired distribution in the environment.
2. Optimal Extinction Paths: Internal noise, due to the random interactions of individuals, plays a fundamental role in a wide variety of biological dynamical systems. In recent years, researchers have identified situations where even weak noise can induce a large fluctuation that leads to population or disease extinction, and switching between metastable states in ecological systems. The focus is to provide an overview of noiseSinduced rare events. 

About Dr. Forgoston

Eric Forgoston received his B.A.E. degree in aerospace engineering and M.S. degree in applied mathematics from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics from the University of Arizona. As a postdoctoral fellow, he received a National Academies’ National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Since 2010, he has been a faculty member with the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Montclair State University where he is currently an Associate Professor. His research interests include nonlinear systems dynamics, fluid mechanics, stochastic analysis, mathematical biology and epidemiology, and the control of multiagent systems with applications to robotics.