Papers › Impact of Variable Speed on Collective Movement of Animal Groups
Impact of Variable Speed on Collective Movement of Animal Groups
Pascal P. Klamser, Luis Gómez-Nava, Tim Landgraf, Jolle W. Jolles, David Bierbach, Pawel Romanczuk
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
A variety of agent-based models has been proposed to account for the emergence of coordinated collective behavior of animal groups from simple interaction rules. A common, simplifying assumption of such collective movement models, is the consideration of individual agents moving with a constant speed. In this work we critically re-asses this assumption underlying a vast majority of collective movement models. First, we show the omnipresent speed variability observed in different species of live fish and artificial agents (RoboFish). Based on theoretical considerations accounting for inertia and rotational friction, we derive a functional dependence of the turning response of individuals on their instantaneous speed (confirmed by experimental data). We investigate how the interplay of variable speed and speed-dependent turning affects self-organized collective behavior by implementing an agent-based model which accounts for both effects. We show, that besides average speed, the individual speed variability may have a dramatic impact on the emergent collective dynamics, as two groups differing only in their speed variability, and being otherwise identical in all other behavioral parameters, can be in two fundamentally different stationary states. We find that the local coupling between group polarization and individual speed is strongest at the order-disorder transition. Furthermore, we demonstrate a decrease in polarization with group size for groups of individuals with variable speed, and a sudden decrease in mean individual speed at a critical group size (N=4 for Voronoi interactions) linked to a topological transition from an all-to-all to a distributed spatial interaction network. Overall, our work highlights the importance to account for fundamental kinematic constraints in general, and variable speed in particular, when modeling self-organized collective dynamics.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections