Navigating in a complex and noisy environment as a group
Abstract
Fish living in an aquatic environment have to face many challenges on a daily basis. They have to obtain sufficient energy and other nutrients required for maintenance, growth, and reproduction while avoiding predation, and all these activities have to be conducted in an environment that is constantly subjected to turbulence, visibility variations, and complex obstacles. To enable fish to navigate and survive in such an environment, evolution has equipped them with sensors, controllers, and actuators to detect and respond to these constantly changing environments, and there must be a simple yet extremely robust and universal strategy to coordinate these systems to control their locomotion and social behaviors. In addition to multimodal sensory systems and control strategies, in this proposal, the schooling behavior is hypothesized to be another mechanism fish utilize to efficiently navigate and explore in a turbulent environment. It has been suggested that fish locomotion in turbulence is sensitive to the specific turbulencegeneration method and flow characteristics used in each study. Based on his extensive experience in developing water tunnel and turbulence control, the PI proposes to design a new FATE (Fish Aquarium with a Turbulent Environment) system. In contrast to most existing facilities, the FATE system can control the mean flow rate and turbulence separately. We will introduce and control parameters that are used in the turbulence community to quantify the range of scales, the fluctuations of velocity gradient, and the turbulence intensity to ensure the reproducibility of the experiments. In addition to the FATE facility, a companion facility located at Harvard University will be used to conduct the baseline measurements of fish schooling behaviors using different species, flow rates, and with/without a coherent cylinder wake. Consistent experimental protocols will be implemented in both facilities and the results will be compared to help us to gain insights into fishs response to incoming turbulence. The results will also be correlated to the number of members in a school to shed light on the role of social behaviors in a turbulent and complex environment. This could potentially inspire and innovate the design of compact unmanned underwater vehicles and robotic systems that have to face the same challenges as fish do regularly.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 05, 2021
- Source ID
- N000142112661
Entities
People
- Rui Ni
Organizations
- Johns Hopkins University
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy