title: Optimal switching between geocentric and egocentric strategies in navigation.
abstract: Animals use a combination of egocentric navigation driven by the internal integration of environmental cues, interspersed with geocentric course correction and reorientation. These processes are accompanied by uncertainty in sensory acquisition of information, planning and execution. Inspired by observations of dung beetle navigational strategies that show switching between geocentric and egocentric strategies, we consider the question of optimal reorientation rates for the navigation of an agent moving along a preferred direction in the presence of multiple sources of noise. We address this using a model that takes the form of a correlated random walk at short time scales that is punctuated by reorientation events leading to a biased random walks at long time scales. This allows us to identify optimal alternation schemes and characterize their robustness in the context of noisy sensory acquisition as well as performance errors linked with variations in environmental conditions and agent-environment interactions.
authors: Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences , Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University , Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
authors: O
authors: 0000-0001-9481-7967
authors: O
authors: Peleg
authors: Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA; Department of Physics, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA; Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Kavli Institute for NanoBio Science and Technology, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
authors: L
authors: L
authors: Mahadevan
keywords: cognition; navigation; optimal switching; random walks