Biomedical Engineering Reference
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Figure 3. Collective movements. (a) Spreading agents (arrows), are located roughly side by side. (b)
Two seeking agents head to the closest mineral unit (gray spots). (c) Caravanning agents tending to
align. (d) Five guarding agents patrolling a deposit.
are omitted here due to space constraints, but they
are presented in full in Rodriguez, 2004. As shown
in Figure 4, the amount of resources collected
by this team increases monotonically over time.
Early in simulations (during the first 5,000 steps),
both this and the non-guarding flocking team (nf)
collect minerals faster than any other team. After
the first few thousand steps, the explored area of
each team is wide enough for teams to find each
others' homes.
Accordingly, the amount of mineral decreases
in subsequent iterations for most teams, especially
the non-flocking teams. The differences in the
mean amount of collected minerals by each team
are statistically significant at the level of 95% ac-
cording to a two-way ANOVA, both in sociality
(flocking vs. independent) and guarding strategy
(full-guarding, home-only and none). These data
suggest two main hypotheses. First, teams of col-
To assess the effectiveness of collective move-
ment behaviors, we allowed the flocking team to
compete against independent movement teams
in simulations. The independent moving agents
follow the same model explained above, with the
important exception that they do not take into
account other agents in their dynamics (although
they still avoid collisions). Additionally, we
implemented three different strategies employed
by the agents to protect the minerals and compete
against their rivals: (1) Full guarding, in which
agents guard their homes and any deposits they
find. (2) Home-guarding, where agents will not
guard a deposit, but will still guard their own
home. (3) Non-guarding, the strategy in which
agents do not have a guarding state.
When all teams compete against each other
simultaneously, the clear winner is the home-
guarding flocking (hf) team. Experimental details
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