Rhythmic behavior of social insects from single to multibody

Hayashi, Y. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9207-6322, Yuki, M., Sugawara, K., Kikuchi, T. and Tsuji, K. (2012) Rhythmic behavior of social insects from single to multibody. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 60 (5). pp. 714-721. ISSN 0921-8890 doi: 10.1016/j.robot.2011.06.016

Abstract/Summary

Revealing the evolution of well-organized social behavior requires understanding a mechanism by which collective behavior is produced. A well-organized group may be produced by two possible mechanisms, namely, a central control and a distributed control. In the second case, local interactions between interchangeable components function at the bottom of the collective behavior. We focused on a simple behavior of an individual ant and analyzed the interactions between a pair of ants. In an experimental set-up, we placed the workers in a hemisphere without a nest, food, and a queen, and recorded their trajectories. The temporal pattern of velocity of each ant was obtained. From this bottom-up approach, we found the characteristic behavior of a single worker and a pair of workers as follows: (1) Activity of each individual has a rhythmic component. (2) Interactions between a pair of individuals result in two types of coupling, namely the anti-phase and the in-phase coupling. The direct physical contacts between the pair of workers might cause a phase shift of the rhythmic components in individual ants. We also build up a simple model based on the coupled oscillators toward the understanding of the whole colony behavior.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/30812
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Life Sciences > School of Biological Sciences > Department of Bio-Engineering
Uncontrolled Keywords	rhythmic behavior; coupled oscillator; Diacamma sp.; physical contact
Publisher	Elsevier
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