'Collective search behaviour in chaotic flows' image by Dr Colin Torney, Dr Zoltan Neufeld, Prof Iain Couzin
Scientists have gained new insights into the collective behaviour of animal groups which may lead to the development of technologies that could detect explosives, landmines, or locating people in search-and rescue operations.
The research, conducted by the UCD School of Mathematical Science and UCD Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory (CASL) in collaboration Princeton University, was recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), one of the most highly cited scientific journals covering the fields of mathematics and physics.
Throughout the natural world, organisms are constantly faced with the challenge of locating the resources required for their survival. Often this means navigating their environment by following information signals such as chemicals, heat or magnetic fields. Groups such as schools of fish or herds of animals share this information and this collective behaviour can greatly improve their ability to navigate.
Until now, however, there was little understanding of the mechanisms used by organisms to track chemical signals distorted by the chaotic flows that exist in turbulent air or aquatic environments.
Co-author, Dr Zoltan Neufeld, UCD School of Mathematical Science and UCD Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory (CASL) explains the new research findings: “Organisms search for the source of a chemical signal based on local information using a simple collective search strategy. “
“Individual organisms use simple rules to determine their level of confidence in the validity of their direction of movement and alter the interactions with their neighbors accordingly, being more independent when confidence is high but having the tendency to follow others in the group when confidence drops. This allows them to collectively find their target without having any individual level search strategy or without having sophisticated sensing or computational abilities."
“Therefore simple local interactions without central control can lead to a higher level cognitive or information processing ability and group-level collective intelligence. This is a common characteristic of many complex adaptive systems found in nature such as biological and social groups including animals.”
“Understanding the ability of these groups to perform search tasks will have important consequences for the development of distributed technologies, such as olfactory robot swarms, with applications in the detection of explosives, landmines, or locating people in search-and-rescue operations, ” Dr Neufeld concluded.
The lead author of the paper, Dr Colin Torney conducted the research as part of his PhD at the UCD School of Mathematical Science. Co-author Prof Iain Couzin, from the Collective Animal Behaviour research group at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University is the world leader in the field of collective animal behavior research. Dr Torney recently joined the Princeton group and the research will be extended to related animal lab experiment at the Princeton group, led by Prof Couzin, with further theoretical and computational work to be carried out at both at UCD and Princeton.
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