Physiology and Neural Control of Movement in Aquatic Animals; Introduction and Roadmap

摘要

It is relatively common to hear, among engineers, the argument that imitating biology is not necessarily the best way to build machines. Cars do not have legs and airplanes do not flap their wings. And indeed, the combination of two "un-biological" designs, fixed wings and wheels are both essential to modern aircrafts. This somewhat "conservative" engineering consideration should not be simplistically dismissed. If one focuses on the goal of high speed, fixed wings, turbines, wheels and propellers can hardly be matched by biological systems. But the perspective changes in a radical way when one looks at other performance criteria such as, agile maneuvering at low speed, adaptability, robustness in the face of unexpected perturbations and of system errors. On these criteria, animals are still outperforming the most advanced machines. And so are their brains. There too it appears that the commuting speed of current day's electronics is orders of magnitude superior to the speed of nerve cells, whose units of transmission, the action potentials, take the order of 10{sup}(-3) seconds. But this is only an apparent superiority, as the speed with which we recognize a familiar face and coordinate a multitude of muscles is still superior to the rate at which similar operation are accomplished (if at all) by today's computer systems.