Bio-Inspired Distributed Sensing Record

PROBLEM: A bacterial population senses its environment collectively: chemotaxis moves cells up attractant gradients, quorum sensing gates gene expression on population density, and flocking aligns individual trajectories into coherent group motion. A coupled quorum-sensing–chemotaxis–flocking framework for this collective motion was published in 2026, with autoinducer thresholds switching cells from planktonic swimming to aligned swarming and then to sessile biofilm. Yet distributed sensor networks built on this bio-inspired logic have no standard record of their collective state: no log of when the network switched modes, what signal threshold triggered the switch, or which nodes were in which state.

SOLUTION: A bio-inspired distributed sensing record: every sensor node logged with its mode (searching, aligned, settled), the signal level that triggered each mode switch, and the population-density estimate at the time — so a distributed network's collective decisions have the same traceable threshold history that bacterial populations demonstrably use.

EVIDENCE BASIS: DOCUMENTED — Keller–Segel chemotaxis modeling; coupled QS–chemotaxis–flocking framework, MDPI Microorganisms 14(11): 2524 (2026); quorum sensing and chemotaxis as documented mechanisms (Waters & Bassler 2005; Current Biology 2024).