Elio Tuci1, Vito Trianni, Andrew King and Simon Garnier

Front. Robot. AI, 10 December 2019

 

The social processes that give rise to coordinated actions of a group of agents and the emergence of global structures—referred to as collective behaviors—are observed in a range of biological and artificial systems. Collective behavior research, therefore, focuses upon a range of different phenomena with the common goal of understanding the dynamics of emergent group level responses, and has resulted in a burgeoning, diverse, and interdisciplinary research community.

Studying collective behaviors in biological and artificial systems is particularly challenging because of their intrinsic complexity, requiring novel approaches that can help unraveling these systems in order to explain how and why certain patterns are produced and maintained. This Research Topic brings together a collection of studies that focus on technological and methodological tools that can support the understanding of collective behaviors. The contributions included within the Research Topic can be broadly categorized as: (i) Review Articles, (ii) Tools and Technologies, and (iii) Empirical Studies.

Our goal is to facilitate the dissemination of ideas, theories, and methods among scientists that share an interest on the study of collective behavior in all its diverse manifestations. It is our hope that, together, this Research Topic and contributions may afford a more complete understanding of the nature of proximate and ultimate causes of collective behaviors in biological systems, and provide opportunity to generate a theoretical framework to engineer robust, resilient, and effective technologies, such as multi-robot systems, smart grids, and sensor networks.

Source: www.frontiersin.org

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