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Professors Malcolm MacIver and Neelesh Patankar are collaborating to develop a first-of-its-kind neuromechanical simulation of freely swimming weakly electric knifefish, a model system in neurobiology. These fish hunt at night in the muddy rivers of the Amazon basin using only a weak, self-generated electric field to perceive their world.

A complete neuromechanical model of the knifefish is being developed by coupling Professor MacIver's model of the fish's nervous system with Professor Patankar's free swimming computational fluid dynamic model.

Professor MacIver works at the intersection of engineering and neuroscience using the weakly electric knifefish model system. He is an expert in large-scale neuronal simulations, neurophysiology, robotics, and fish motion capture and kinematic analysis.

Professor Patankar has expertise in fully resolved simulation schemes for immersed bodies in fluids. He has recently devised an efficient algorithm to simulate aquatic locomotion, which can also be applied to free flight of small fliers.

Shown in the image below is a simulation of a free swimming weakly electric knifefish. The body shape and kinematics are obtained from live fish in Professor MacIver's lab. These go into an algorithm for free swimming of immersed flexible bodies that computes the resulting flows and the swimming velocity of the body. The dynamics of the flow around the fish can be displayed using an animation using particles whose opacity is proportional to how much fluid movement occurs.

Besides the development of a neuromechanical model, this bioengineering work forms the basis of two other research efforts: one to develop a robotic fish and a novel underwater vehicle (with Professors Lynch, Colgate, and Peshkin in Mechanical Engineering); and one to further the state of the art in the computer animation of animals in fluid environments (with Professor Gooch in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science).

(Links to MacIver and Patankar research websites)