Related papers: Navigation between initial and desired community s…

Animals use a combination of egocentric navigation driven by the internal integration of environmental cues, interspersed with geocentric course correction and reorientation, often with uncertainty in sensory acquisition of information,…

An extended social force model with a dynamic navigation field is proposed to study bidirectional pedestrian movement. The dynamic navigation field is introduced to describe the desired direction of pedestrian motion resulting from the…

Does an ecological community allow stable coexistence? Identifying the general principles that determine the answer to this question is a central problem of theoretical ecology. Random matrix theory approaches have uncovered the general…

The dynamics of two competing species in a finite size community is one of the most studied problems in population genetics and community ecology. Stochastic fluctuations lead, inevitably, to the extinction of one of the species, but the…

Small-world graphs, which combine randomized and structured elements, are seen as prevalent in nature. Jon Kleinberg showed that in some graphs of this type it is possible to route, or navigate, between vertices in few steps even with very…

Real-world networks are neither regular nor random, a fact elegantly explained by mechanisms such as the Watts-Strogatz or the Barabasi-Albert models, among others. Both mechanisms naturally create shortcuts and hubs, which while enhancing…

Navigability, an ability to find a logarithmically short path between elements using only local information, is one of the most fascinating properties of real-life networks. However, the exact mechanism responsible for the formation of…

Abrupt transitions in ecosystems can be interconnected, raising challenges for science and management in identifying sufficient interventions to prevent them or recover from undesirable shifts. Here we use principles of network…

Inspired by the swarming or flocking of animal systems we study groups of agents moving in unbounded 2D space. Individual trajectories derive from a ``bottom-up'' principle: individuals reorient to maximise their future path entropy over…

We develop a rigorous theory of external influences on finite discrete dynamical systems, going beyond the perturbation paradigm, in that the external influence need not be a small contribution. Indeed, the covariance condition can be…

How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…

Navigating toward a known target in a noisy environment is a fundamental problem shared across biological, physical, and engineered systems. Although optimal strategies are often framed in terms of continuous, fine-grained feedback, we show…

In the commons, communities whose growth depends on public goods, individuals often rely on surprisingly simple strategies, or heuristics, to decide whether to contribute to the common good (at risk of exploitation by free-riders). Although…

This paper explores the Navigation Among Movable Obstacles (NAMO) problem and proposes joint path and push planning: which path to take and in what direction the obstacles should be pushed at, given a start and goal position. We present a…

Current research challenges in sustainability science require us to consider nonlinear changes e.g. shifts that do not happen gradually but can be sudden and difficult to predict. Central questions are therefore how we can prevent harmful…

Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…

Traditional approaches to the design of multi-agent navigation algorithms consider the environment as a fixed constraint, despite the obvious influence of spatial constraints on agents' performance. Yet hand-designing improved environment…

In this paper, we look into the minimum obstacle displacement (MOD) planning problem from a mobile robot motion planning perspective. This problem finds an optimal path to goal by displacing movable obstacles when no path exists due to…

Autonomous exploration allows mobile robots to navigate in initially unknown territories in order to build complete representations of the environments. In many real-life applications, environments often contain dynamic obstacles which can…

Navigation safety is critical for many autonomous systems such as self-driving vehicles in an urban environment. It requires an explicit consideration of boundary constraints that describe the borders of any infeasible, non-navigable, or…