Active Sensing Collectives Lab

Active sensing and collectives

Active sensing agents like echolocating animals and robots/drones using RADAR/SONAR are well understood as individual agents. Broadly speaking, active-sensing agents emit 'probes' of energy into the environment, and perceive how this energy is modulated by objects in the environment. However, when active-sensing agents come together in groups, things aren't so simple anymore. With each agent emitting probes all the time, there's potential for jamming (emitted probes overlapping relevant signals), and even just confusion (whose probe is whose?).


Despite the expected complexity of active-sensing in collectives, as usual, animals defy our imagination. Echolocating bats are one of the most gregarious animals in the world, forming groups of tens to millions. How are individual agents managing to move together in these extremely information-limited settings, and what sensorimotor strategies are they using to move together in a cohesive group?

Observe, model, compare, repeat. And build your own tools as you go.

The lab combines a multi-disciplinary thought process that combines rigorous modelling, in-field observations, and experiments (not necessarily in that order!). While data is 'cheap to collect', finding the right tools and methods to analyse the often extremely unique datasets is not as cheap, or common. Another focus of our group is to develop computational methods where needed, with the final goal being long-term community use. For more information on the research of the group, check out this page.

Who are we?

We are an interdisciplinary research group working at the interface of sensory biology, robotics and collective behaviour. We are based at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz. See Members for the latest ensemble of people and their projects.

Rolling Updates

  • 1st March 2025 : The 'official' start date for the Active Sensing Collectives lab.

  • 28th August 2024 : The Active Sensing Collectives lab funded by the Carl-Zeiss Stiftung as part of the CZS Nexus program for the proposal titled Swarms in censored realities: how biological and technological collectives move in the dark (link)