Patience is a virtue: How nature achieves group navigation with minimal cooperativity

Group navigation of a constrained environment can be difficult to achieve without jamming as the local density of the group increases. The ease with which insects and other cognitively simple organisms achieve this feat suggests that a distributed computing solution must be possible, wherein the complexities of the problem are broken down into a large number of individual decisions that each require only a small amount of information about the surrounding environment. We test this hypothesis by studying the collective navigational capabilities of social cockroaches and demonstrating that they avoid jams more effectively than asocial bristlebots. We leverage our observations to devise an agent-based model in which movement decisions require only four bits of external information to be distilled, regardless of the complexity of the environment or the local density of agents present. The social interaction we employ requires an agent who approaches another from behind to stop and wait for the agent in front to move out of the way before proceeding, resulting in a queue-forming tendency that precludes the formation of jams at the expense of slower individual egress through the environment. We define a metric called the effective mean crossing time for quantifying how efficiently a group of agents collectively navigates around a sequence of obstacles, and we demonstrate that our employed social interaction leads to marked improvement in this metric, especially as the local agent density increases.