https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/s10189-024-00465-0
Regular Article - Flowing Matter
A hitchhiker’s guide to active motion
1
Institut für Theoretische Physik II: Weiche Materie, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Universitätsstraße 1, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany
2
Institut für Sicherheit und Qualität bei Fleisch, Max Rubner-Institut, E.-C.-Baumann-Straße 20, 95326, Kulmbach, Germany
a
tobias.plasczyk@hhu.de
b
hartmut.loewen@hhu.de
c
rene.wittmann@hhu.de
Received:
3
October
2024
Accepted:
28
November
2024
Published online:
3
January
2025
Intelligent decisions in response to external informative input can allow organisms to achieve their biological goals while spending very little of their own resources. In this paper, we develop and study a minimal model for a navigational task, performed by an otherwise completely motorless particle that possesses the ability of hitchhiking in a bath of active Brownian particles (ABPs). Hitchhiking refers to identifying and attaching to suitable surrounding bath particles. Using a reinforcement learning algorithm, such an agent, which we refer to as intelligent hitchhiking particle (IHP), is enabled to persistently navigate in the desired direction. This relatively simple IHP can also anticipate and react to characteristic motion patterns of their hosts, which we exemplify for a bath of chiral ABPs (cABPs). To demonstrate that the persistent motion of the IHP will outperform that of the bath particles in view of long-time ballistic motion, we calculate the mean-squared displacement and discuss its dependence on the density and persistence time of the bath ABPs by means of an analytic model.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/s10189-024-00465-0.
© The Author(s) 2024
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
