On the Nonlinear Dynamics of Collective Decision-Making in Nature and Design

The successful deployment of complex, multi-agent systems requires well-designed, agent-level control strategies that accommodate sensing, communication and computational limitations on individual agents. Indeed, many applications demand system-level dynamics to be robust to disturbance and adaptive in the face of changes in the environment. Remarkably, animal groups, from bird flocks to fish schools, exhibit such robust and adaptive behaviors, even as individual animals have their own limitations. To better understand and leverage the parallels between networks in nature and design, a principled examination of collective dynamics is warranted. Naomi Ehrich Leonard will describe an analytical framework based on nonlinear dynamical systems theory for the realization of collective decision-making that allows for the rigorous study of the mechanisms of observed collective animal behavior together with the design of distributed strategies for collective dynamics with provable performance.