Related papers: Collective search with finite perception: transien…
Search processes in the natural world are often punctuated by home returns that reset the position of foraging animals, birds, and insects. Many theoretical, numerical, and experimental studies have now demonstrated that this strategy can…
Animal groups collaborate with one another throughout their lives to better comprehend their surroundings. Here, we try to model, using continuous random walks, how the entire process of birth, reproduction, and death might impact the…
Accurate interception of moving objects, such as catching a ball, requires the nervous system to overcome sensory delays, noise, and environmental dynamics. One key challenge is predicting future object motion in the presence of sensory…
We study a new random search process: the \textit{taxi-drive}. The motivation for this process comes from urban sensing, in which sensors are mounted on moving vehicles such as taxis, allowing urban environments to be opportunistically…
The kinetics of a variety of transport-controlled processes can be reduced to the problem of determining the mean time needed to arrive at a given location for the first time, the so called mean first passage time (MFPT) problem. The…
In practice, objective functions of real-time control systems can have multiple local minimums or can dramatically change over the function space, making them hard to optimize. To efficiently optimize such systems, in this paper, we develop…
For autonomous robots to navigate a complex environment, it is crucial to understand the surrounding scene both geometrically and semantically. Modern autonomous robots employ multiple sets of sensors, including lidars, radars, and cameras.…
Adaptive random search approaches have been shown to be effective for global optimization problems, where under certain conditions, the expected performance time increases only linearly with dimension. However, previous analyses assume that…
Spatial ecological networks are widely used to model interactions between georeferenced biological entities (e.g., populations or communities). The analysis of such data often leads to a two-step approach where groups containing similar…
Usually, routing models in pedestrian dynamics assume that agents have fulfilled and global knowledge about the building's structure. However, they neglect the fact that pedestrians possess no or only parts of information about their…
Detecting dynamic patterns of task-specific responses shared across heterogeneous datasets is an essential and challenging problem in many scientific applications in medical science and neuroscience. In our motivating example of rodent…
Robotic science missions in remote environments, such as deep ocean and outer space, can involve studying phenomena that cannot directly be observed using on-board sensors but must be deduced by combining measurements of correlated…
I describe a framework for adaptive scientific exploration based on iterating an Observation--Inference--Design cycle that allows adjustment of hypotheses and observing protocols in response to the results of observation on-the-fly, as data…
Cognitive maps play a crucial role in facilitating flexible behaviour by representing spatial and conceptual relationships within an environment. The ability to learn and infer the underlying structure of the environment is crucial for…
Model-based control is a popular paradigm for robot navigation because it can leverage a known dynamics model to efficiently plan robust robot trajectories. However, it is challenging to use model-based methods in settings where the…
When searching a target in a natural scene, both the target's visual properties and similarity to the background influence whether (and how fast) humans are able to find it. However, thus far it has been unclear whether searchers adjust the…
Computational optimal feedback control (OFC) models in the sensorimotor control literature span a vast range of different implementations. Among the popular algorithms, finite-horizon, receding-horizon or infinite-horizon linear-quadratic…
Autonomous navigation in unfamiliar environments often relies on geometric mapping and planning strategies that overlook rich semantic cues such as signs, room numbers, and textual labels. We propose a novel semantic navigation framework…
Many modern robotics applications require robots to function autonomously in dynamic environments including other decision making agents, such as people or other robots. This calls for fast and scalable interactive motion planning. This…
What is the fastest way of finding a randomly hidden target? This question of general relevance is of vital importance for foraging animals. Experimental observations reveal that the search behaviour of foragers is generally intermittent:…