Sled dogs as tethered active agents: Part 2

Teams of sled dogs balance an individual's perception, decision making, and physical capabilities with the collective performance of the whole. To do well, this active network must maintain collective stability while simultaneously enabling sufficient agility to respond to a dynamic environment and attempts to control the team by a driver. Unlike many self-organizing systems, these teams are assembled in a manner which reflects and embraces the underlying diversity of the team members in service of competition performance. In this study, we complement a suite of multiscale fieldwork measurements of sled dog teams (see part 1) during training to understand how dog teams balance responsive agility with stability using harness physics, cyclic gaits, and simplified perceptual decision making rules. Our work reconciles low dimensional descriptions of dog behavior into the emergent dynamics of the team.