Coordinated directional switches often emerge in moving biological groups replete with individual-level interactions. Recent self-propelled particles models can somewhat mimic the patterns of directional switches, but they usually do not include the effects of time delays in the interactions. Here, we focus on investigating the influence of time-delay interactions on the collective motion of swarming locusts, an experimentally well-studied system that exhibits ordered switches between clockwise and counterclockwise movement. We show, both analytically and numerically, that time delays of different types can affect the directional switches. Specifically, for the sufficiently small response delay, increasing the transmission delay can increase the mean switching time, while, for the large response delay, increasing the transmission delay may destroy the ordered directional switches. Our results decipher the role of time-delay interactions in the collective motion, which could be beneficial to the design of collective intelligent devices.

• Received 27 December 2021
• Accepted 22 June 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.033054

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.

Published by the American Physical Society