Focusing attention in populations of semi-autonomously operating sensing nodes.

Cognition and the cognitive processing of sensory information in biological entities is known to occur over multiple layers of processing. In the example of human vision there are a vast number of photo-receptors feeding into various layers of cells which pre-process the original information before it arrives to the brain (as biased data).We propose to use a mechanism known to theoretical biologists as a means to bring about adaptive selforganization in colonies of social insects, and to apply it to such early stage signal processing. The underlying mathematical model is simple, and in the coming years, robotics will move into an era when aggregating simple computation devices into massively large collectives becomes feasible, making it possible to actually build such distributed cognitive sensing systems.