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  • Open Access

Policy heterogeneity improves collective olfactory search in three-dimensional turbulence

Lorenzo Piro1,*, Robin A. Heinonen1,2, Maurizio Carbone3,4, Luca Biferale1, and Massimo Cencini3,4

  • *Contact author: lorenzo.piro@roma2.infn.it
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Phys. Rev. E 113, 044401 – Published 2 April, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/6zls-m67c

Abstract

We examine how heterogeneous swarms, mixing exploratory and exploitative agents with distinct decision rules, consistently outperform homogeneous ones where each agent balances exploration and exploitation individually, performing experiments in two contrasting deployment scenarios. Using odor fields from state-of-the-art direct numerical simulations of the 3D Navier-Stokes equations, we find that policy diversity typically allows the group to reach the source of the odor more efficiently by mitigating the detrimental effects of spatiotemporal turbulent correlations. These findings provide insights into collective search behavior and offer promising strategies for the design of robust, bioinspired search algorithms in engineered systems.

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Phys. Rev. E 113, 044401– Published 2 April, 2026
  • Received 14 April 2025
  • Accepted 5 March 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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