Williams Lab

We study idea.

From a flock of birds wheeling on a thermal to a gaggle of paraglider pilots reading the same invisible air, collective movement is everywhere — and it is never free. Movement carries an energetic cost, and this cost can be extreme. The MoveinFormation lab investigates how collective behaviour may provide the up-to-date information individuals need to make movement decisions with optimal outcomes, particularly in dynamic changing environemnts. Our focus is flight. We integrate systems both evolved and engineered — soaring birds, human pilots, aerial robotics — to leverage their unique perspectives on a common challenge: moving efficiently through a highly dynamic landscape, and the decision rules that structure life on the move.

Optimal Movement Theory

Movement is rarely about distance alone — it is about energy. We are developing Optimal Movement Theory as a predictive framework in which the probability of any movement decision emerges from the expected energetic gain in the environment, weighed against the mechanical cost of locomotion and the animal’s internal state. By treating these as common, convertible currencies, OMT aims to explain not just how animals move, but why they choose one option over another — and to make those choices predictable across very different species and landscapes.

Collective Sensing of Flows

The energy that soaring animals depend on — thermals, updrafts, the structure of moving air — is invisible and constantly shifting. No individual can sense all of it at once, but a group can. We study collective sensing: how individuals read the movements of others to locate energy they could not detect alone, effectively sampling the environment through their neighbours. Soaring birds and competitive paraglider pilots both exploit this, climbing on cues from those who found the lift first, and it raises sharp questions about when to share, when to follow, and when to go it alone.

Bio-logging

Understanding social movement decisions means measuring not just where an animal goes, but what it is attending to as it decides. Collective biologging is our approach to capturing many individuals at once with on-body sensors — recording movement, body orientation, and, increasingly, gaze — so that the behaviour of an individual can be read alongside the social context that shaped it. By instrumenting whole groups, from soaring birds to pilots in a gaggle, we reconstruct the flow of information through a moving collective in fine detail.