Berlin 2018 – scientific programme

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SYBS: Symposium Physics of Biological and Synthetic Active Matter

SYBS 1: Physics of Biological and Synthetic Active Matter

SYBS 1.3: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 13, 2018, 10:30–11:00, H 0105

Learning to navigate in dynamic environments: animal behavior and artificial intelligence — •Antonio Celani — ICTP. Trieste, Italy

I will discuss two examples of difficult navigation tasks in highly dynamical environments. The first one is thermal soaring in birds. Birds and gliders piggyback ascending currents to fly with a reduced expenditure of energy, for example, during migration, and to extend their flying range. Flow in the thermals is highly turbulent, which poses the challenge of the orientation in strongly fluctuating environments. The second one is gravitaxis by smart microswimmers. These are self-propelled particles that can sense basic mechanical cues from their surroundings and respond to them in order to reach the highest altitude within some time horizon. We combine numerical simulations of fluid flow with reinforcement learning methods to identify strategies of navigation that can cope with potentially dangerous flow configurations and exploit favorable ones.