Related papers: Emergent Workload Inequality in Collective Excavat…
Social organisms which construct nests consisting of tunnels and chambers necessarily navigate confined and crowded conditions. Unlike low-density collectives like bird flocks and insect swarms, in which hydrodynamic and statistical…
Using elementary distributed computing techniques we suggest an explanation for two unexplained phenomena in regards to ant colonies, (a) a substantial amount of ants in an ant colony are idle, and (b) the observed low survivability of new…
Cooperative transport is a striking phenomenon where multiple agents join forces to transit a payload too heavy for the individual. While social animals such as ants are routinely observed to coordinate transport at scale, reproducing the…
Biological swarms, such as ant colonies, achieve collective goals through decentralized and stochastic individual behaviors. Similarly, physical systems composed of gases, liquids, and solids exhibit random particle motion governed by…
Collective motion by animal groups is affected by internal interactions, external constraints and the influx of information. A quantitative understanding of how these different factors give rise to different modes of collective motion is,…
Synchronization is one of the most striking instances of collective behavior, occurring in many natural phenomena. For example, in some ant species, ants are inactive within the nest most of the time, but their bursts of activity are highly…
Many ant species employ distributed population density estimation in applications ranging from quorum sensing [Pra05], to task allocation [Gor99], to appraisal of enemy colony strength [Ada90]. It has been shown that ants estimate density…
Behavioral heterogeneities in animals, also known as syndromes, play a crucial role in understanding how natural populations flexibly adapt to environmental changes. In ant species like \textit{Aphaenogaster senilis}, two key roles in…
When researching robot swarms, many studies observe complex group behavior emerging from the individual agents' simple local actions. However, the task of learning an individual policy to produce a desired group behavior remains a…
Swarm robotic systems are mainly inspired by swarms of socials insects and the collective emergent behavior that arises from their cooperation at the lower lever. Despite the limited sensory ability, computational power, and communication…
Social insect colonies and ensemble machine learning methods represent two of the most successful examples of decentralized information processing in nature and computation respectively. Here we develop a rigorous mathematical framework…
Recent works have proven that intricate cooperative behaviors can emerge in agents trained using meta reinforcement learning on open ended task distributions using self-play. While the results are impressive, we argue that self-play and…
Collective behaviour in biological systems pitches us against theoretical challenges way beyond the borders of ordinary statistical physics. The lack of concepts like scaling and renormalization is particularly grievous, as it forces us to…
Natural groups of animals, such as swarms of social insects, exhibit astonishing degrees of task specialization, useful to address complex tasks and to survive. This is supported by phenotypic plasticity: individuals sharing the same…
Ecological communities exhibit pervasive patterns and inter-relationships between size, abundance, and the availability of resources. We use scaling ideas to develop a unified, model-independent framework for understanding the distribution…
Collective behavior of active elements inspired by mass of biological organisms is addressed. Especially, two topics are focused on among amazing behaviors performed by colony of ants. First, task allocation phenomena are treated from the…
Statistical physicists and social scientists both study extensively some characteristic features of the unequal distributions of energy, cluster or avalanche sizes and of income, wealth etc among the particles (or sites) and population…
The response threshold model explains the emergence of division of labor (i.e., task specialization) in an unstructured population by assuming that the individuals have different propensities to work on different tasks. The incentive to…
In collective systems, the available agents are a limited resource that must be allocated among tasks to maximize collective performance. Computing the optimal allocation of several agents to numerous tasks through a brute-force approach…
We explore self-organizing strategies for role assignment in a foraging task carried out by a colony of artificial agents. Our strategies are inspired by various mechanisms of division of labor (polyethism) observed in eusocial insects like…