Related papers: Optimizing the search for resources by sharing inf…

Finding the distant source of an odor dispersed by a turbulent flow is a vital task for many organisms, either for foraging or for mating purposes. At the level of individual search, animals like moths have developed effective strategies to…

How to best exploit patchy resources? This long-standing question belongs to the extensively studied class of explore/exploit problems that arise in a wide range of situations, from animal foraging, to robotic exploration, and to human…

We address the problem where a mobile search agent seeks to find an unknown number of stationary objects distributed in a bounded search domain, and the search mission is subject to time/distance constraint. Our work accounts for false…

A model of communication that is able to cope simultaneously with the problems of search and congestion is presented. We investigate the communication dynamics in model networks and introduce a general framework that enables a search of…

We analyze the long term behavior of interacting populations which can be controlled through harvesting. The dynamics is assumed to be discrete in time and stochastic due to the effect of environmental fluctuations. We present extinction…

In environments with scarce resources, adopting the right search strategy can make the difference between succeeding and failing, even between life and death. At different scales, this applies to molecular encounters in the cell cytoplasm,…

Several types of biological networks have recently been shown to be accurately described by a maximum entropy model with pairwise interactions, also known as the Ising model. Here we present an approach for finding the optimal mappings…

The use of auditory masking has long been of interest in psychoacoustics and for engineering purposes, in order to cover sounds that are disruptive to humans or to species whose habitats overlap with ours. In most cases, we seek to minimize…

Adaptive sampling and planning in robotic environmental monitoring are challenging when the target environmental process varies over space and time. The underlying environmental dynamics require the planning module to integrate future…

Localized communication in swarms has been shown to increase swarm effectiveness in some situations by allowing for additional opportunities for cooperation. However, communication and utilization of potentially outdated information is also…

Finding the best strategy to minimize the time needed to find a given target is a crucial task both in nature and in reaching decisive technological advances. By considering learning agents able to switch their dynamics between standard and…

Effective problem solving among multiple agents requires a better understanding of the role of communication in collaboration. In this paper we show that there are communicative strategies that greatly improve the performance of…

When navigating complex environments, animals often combine multiple strategies to mitigate the effects of external disturbances. These modalities often correspond to different sources of information, leading to speed-accuracy trade-offs.…

Spatial search problems abound in the real world, from locating hidden nuclear or chemical sources to finding skiers after an avalanche. We exemplify the formalism and solution for spatial searches involving two agents that may or may not…

Efficient exploration is critical for learning relational models in large-scale environments with complex, long-horizon tasks. Random exploration methods often collect redundant or irrelevant data, limiting their ability to learn accurate…

Scale-free foraging patterns are widespread among animals. These may be the outcome of an optimal searching strategy to find scarce randomly distributed resources, but a less explored alternative is that this behaviour may result from the…

Animals in groups often exchange calls, in patterns whose temporal structure may be influenced by contextual factors such as physical location and the social network structure of the group. We introduce a model-based analysis for temporal…

We study a simple model of a foraging animal that modifies the substrate on which it moves. This substrate provides its only resource, and the forager manage it by taking a limited portion at each visited site. The resource recovers its…

There is substantial interest in the effect of human mobility patterns on opportunistic communications. Inspired by recent work revisiting some of the early evidence for a L\'evy flight foraging strategy in animals, we analyse datasets on…

Swarm foraging is a common test case application for multi-robot systems. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for controlling swarm robots with limited communication range and storage capacity to efficiently search for and retrieve…