Animal groups as mobile sensor networks

Mobile sensor networks are a rapidly developing technology with applications in environmental monitoring, surveillance and defence. However, engineers designing mobile sensor networks face a significant challenge. How do you design a mobile sensor network that can reliably detect information in noisy, dynamically changing environments, and at the same time make this network energy efficient? Nature appears to have provided solutions to this problem, with moving animal groups such as flocks of birds or schools of fish functioning and facing the same challenges as our own engineered sensor networks. I will present new experiments that set-out to test the mobile-sensor network properties of animals groups. These experiments include quantifying the perceptual ranges of individual fish, and measuring how individuals in groups collectively divide information processing in noisy environments. I will discuss how these experiments hope to provide biologically-inspired solutions to the challenges faced by robotic swarms, as well as answering questions about collective cognition in animal groups.