Individual and Collective Behavior of Small Vibrating Motors Interacting Through a Resonant Plate

We report on experiments of many small motors – cell phone vibrators – glued to and interacting through a resonant plate. We find that individual motors interacting with the plate demonstrate hysteresis in their steady-state frequency due to interactions with plate resonances. For multiple motors running simultaneously, the degree of synchronization between motors increases when the motors’ frequencies are near a resonance of the plate, and the frequency at which the motors synchronize shows a history dependence.