Swarm Intelligence: From Social Bacteria to Humans By: Andrew Schumann

Author: Andrew Schumann

The notion of swarm intelligence was introduced for describing decentralized and self-organized behaviors of groups of animals. Then this idea was extrapolated to design groups of robots which interact locally to cumulate a collective reaction. Some natural examples of swarms are as follows: ant colonies, bee colonies, fish schooling, bird flocking, horse herding, bacterial colonies, multinucleated giant amoebae Physarum polycephalum, etc. In all these examples, individual agents behave locally with an emergence of their common effect. An intelligent behavior of swarm individuals is explained by the following biological reactions to attractants and repellents. Attractants are biologically active things, such as food pieces or sex pheromones, which attract individuals of swarm. Repellents are biologically active things, such as predators, which repel individuals of swarm. As a consequence, attractants and repellents stimulate the directed movement of swarms towards and away from the stimulus, respectively.
It is worth noting that a group of people, such as pedestrians, follow some swarm patterns of flocking or schooling. For instance, humans prefer to avoid a person considered by them as a possible predator and if a substantial part of the group in the situation of escape panic (not less than 5

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