Abstract

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? Nature appears to have provided solutions to this problem, with moving animal groups such as flocks of birds and schools of fish functioning and facing the same challenges as our own engineered sensor networks.

Dr Herbert-Read will present recent work that sets out to test the mobile-sensor network properties of animals groups. These experiments aim to quantify the perceptual ranges and windows of individual fish, and measure how individuals in groups change their reliance on social information when individual perceptual abilities are compromised. He will discuss how these experiments might provide biologically-inspired solutions to the challenges faced by robotic swarms, as well as answering questions about collective perception and cognition in animal groups.

Biogaraphy

James is an experimental biologist with a broad interest in animal behaviour and behavioural ecology. His research integrates topics from sensory ecology, social behaviour, and predatory-prey interactions to understand how animals gather information from their environment, both when on their own and when in groups.

His research combines manipulative experiments, highly quantitative data acquisition methods and novel analytical techniques in the laboratory and the field. Whilst James' research primarily use fishes as model organisms, he has also worked on systems including cicadas and blue whales. Jame is also interested in how bio-inspiration may provide solutions to some of the key challenges facing technology and engineering today.

www.JamesHerbertRead.com