Speaker: Massimo Cencini (Istituto Sistemi Complessi CNR)
Collective olfactory search in turbulent environment: how to balance exploration and exploitation
Many biological and robotic systems face the challenge of locating an odor source in turbulent environments, where intermittent and patchy odor signals render traditional gradient-climbing strategies ineffective. After a brief introduction to the problem of olfactory search, we focus on many agents searching for an odor source in a turbulent environment obtained via direct numerical simulations. Leveraging over the observation that living organisms have evolved remarkable search strategies that balance between exploration and exploitation, we show that an heterogeneous collection of agents with differential policies (explorators and exploitators) outperform similar collections which balance exploration and exploitation at the level of the single agent.
