Patience is a virtue: How nature achieves group navigation with minimal cooperativity
- 1Environmental Laboratory, U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, Mississippi, United States of America
- 2Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States of America
Abstract
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. Author summary: In a famous Chinese parable, a man is shown both heaven and hell. In the latter, a group of men sit around a lavish banquet table, unable to eat because their chopsticks are too long to reach their mouths. In the former, the exact same scenario plays out, except here the men feed each other. In this paper, we compare the behavior of cockroaches to that of vibrating brush-head robots, known as bristlebots, as groups of each attempt to squeeze through a narrow passage. Although the bots and the bugs have different means of locomotion, they navigate their environment in a similar fashion. As in the parable, however, a small of amount of regard for others leads to a much happier outcome. The robots try to push past each other and form logjams that block up the passage, whereas the roaches practice patience and stop and wait for those in front of them to move through the passage first. This result may seem innocuous, but it demonstrates how simple organisms, incapable of sophisticated decision-making, require only the slightest amount of sociality to collectively solve complex problems, such as how to smoothly navigate a challenging environment as a cohesive unit.
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BibTeX
@article{mayo2026patience,
title = {{Patience is a virtue: How nature achieves group navigation with minimal cooperativity}},
author = {Anne M. Mayo and Craig Carrigee and Audrey B. Harrison and Michael L. Mayo and Kevin R. Pilkiewicz},
journal = {PLOS Complex Systems},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1371/journal.pcsy.0000136},
url = {https://journals.plos.org/complexsystems/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcsy.0000136},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Patience is a virtue: How nature achieves group navigation with minimal cooperativity
AU - Anne M. Mayo
AU - Craig Carrigee
AU - Audrey B. Harrison
AU - Michael L. Mayo
AU - Kevin R. Pilkiewicz
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/01
JO - PLOS Complex Systems
DO - 10.1371/journal.pcsy.0000136
UR - https://journals.plos.org/complexsystems/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcsy.0000136
AB - 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. Author summary: In a famous Chinese parable, a man is shown both heaven and hell. In the latter, a group of men sit around a lavish banquet table, unable to eat because their chopsticks are too long to reach their mouths. In the former, the exact same scenario plays out, except here the men feed each other. In this paper, we compare the behavior of cockroaches to that of vibrating brush-head robots, known as bristlebots, as groups of each attempt to squeeze through a narrow passage. Although the bots and the bugs have different means of locomotion, they navigate their environment in a similar fashion. As in the parable, however, a small of amount of regard for others leads to a much happier outcome. The robots try to push past each other and form logjams that block up the passage, whereas the roaches practice patience and stop and wait for those in front of them to move through the passage first. This result may seem innocuous, but it demonstrates how simple organisms, incapable of sophisticated decision-making, require only the slightest amount of sociality to collectively solve complex problems, such as how to smoothly navigate a challenging environment as a cohesive unit.
SN - 2837-8830
ER -