Related papers: An Optimal Switching Approach for Bird Migration

Existing research has yet to reach a consensus on whether and how small flying animals utilize elastic energy storage mechanisms to reduce flight energy expenditure, and there is a lack of systematic and universal methods for assessment. To…

Robots that are trained to perform a task in a fixed environment often fail when facing unexpected changes to the environment due to a lack of exploration. We propose a principled way to adapt the policy for better exploration in changing…

We address the design and synthesis of optimal control strategies for high-dimensional stochastic dynamical systems. Such systems may be deterministic nonlinear systems evolving from random initial states, or systems driven by random…

With technological advancements, the quantity and quality of animal movement data have increased greatly. Currently, no movement model can be used to describe full-year data from migratory species by leveraging both individual movement and…

Organisms that grow and survive in uncertain environments may need to change their physiological state as the environment changes. When the environment is uncertain, one strategy known as bet-hedging is to make these changes randomly and…

Dynamic algorithm selection aims to exploit the complementarity of multiple optimization algorithms by switching between them during the search. While these kinds of dynamic algorithms have been shown to have potential to outperform their…

Limited flight distance and time is a common problem for multicopters. We propose a method for finding the optimal speed and sideslip angle of a multicopter flying a given path to achieve either the longest flight distance or time. Since…

Taking inspiration from how the brain coordinates multiple learning systems is an appealing strategy to endow robots with more flexibility. One of the expected advantages would be for robots to autonomously switch to the least costly system…

Inspired by birds flying through cluttered environments such as dense forests, this paper studies the theoretical foundations of a novel motion planning problem: high-speed navigation through a randomly-generated obstacle field when only…

'Evolutionary rescue' is the potential for evolution to enable population persistence in a changing environment. Even with eventual rescue, evolutionary time lags can cause the population size to temporarily fall below a threshold…

Many organisms, from flies to humans, use visual signals to estimate their motion through the world. To explore the motion estimation problem, we have constructed a camera/gyroscope system that allows us to sample, at high temporal…

The best-response dynamics is an example of an evolutionary game where players update their strategy in order to maximize their payoff. The main objective of this paper is to study a stochastic spatial version of this game based on the…

Evolutionary changes impacts interactions among populations and can disrupt ecosystems by driving extinctions or by collapsing population oscillations, posing significant challenges to biodiversity conservation. This study addresses the…

We investigate the occupancy statistics of birds on a wire and on higher-dimensional substrates. In one dimension, birds land one by one on a wire and rest where they land. Whenever a newly arriving bird lands within a fixed distance of…

Organisms and ecological groups accumulate evidence to make decisions. Classic experiments and theoretical studies have explored this process when the correct choice is fixed during each trial. However, we live in a constantly changing…

Living systems such as neuronal networks and animal groups process information about their environment via the dynamics of interacting units. These can transition between distinct macroscopic behaviors. Near such a transition (or critical…

The goal of this paper is to solve a class of stochastic optimal control problems numerically, in which the state process is governed by an It\^o type stochastic differential equation with control process entering both in the drift and the…

Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…

This paper will detail the basis of our previously developed predictive model for pigeon flight paths based on observations of the specific individual being predicted. We will then describe how this model can be adapted to predict the…

Plant breeding programs use data obtained from multi-environment selection experiments to produce improved varieties with the ultimate aim of maintaining high levels of genetic gain. Selection accuracy can be improved with the use of…