Andreagiovanni Reina
Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz and Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Konstanz, Germa
Título: How Decisions Emerge: From Insect Societies to Brains and Robot Swarms
Resumen: How can simple agents make effective decisions together? This talk builds bridges between biology, robotics, and neuroscience by tracing shared patterns of information processing across these fields. I begin with collective decision-making in social insects and show how its principles can guide decentralised algorithms for robot swarms. In best-of-*n* decisions, a biologically inspired model based on inhibitory signals enables robots to reach decisions faster and more robustly, including in the presence of misbehaving individuals. The talk also challenges the idea that noise is always harmful: under some conditions, individual errors can improve group accuracy and help the swarm respond to environmental change. These results offer a way to investigate the evolutionary advantages of information-processing strategies in natural systems. I then consider how the balance of excitation and inhibition supports fast, flexible, and robust decisions, drawing parallels between the information processing of a superorganism and that of the brain. Finally, I explore how excitatory and inhibitory neural circuits can enable decisions developing through both time and space, and how these ideas can inform robot design.
