Insights from wriggling fish may improve robot design

One characteristic of any large group of animals IS they seem to move constantly and almost at random. It is particularly pronounced when observing a large number of fish; they flicker and wriggle in a constant blur of sparkling scales. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found that these movements are in fact not random at all, but serve to maximise what the fish can extract from their environment, a finding that the researchers believe may have profound implications for robot design.

Mechanical engineer and roboticist Noah Cowan, who led the study, explains that it was already known that all animals have to actively move in order to sense their environment. “There’s a saying in biology that when the world is still, you stop being able to sense it,” he said. To test how this worked, he and his colleagues, including researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), studied fish that generate a weak electric field around their bodies, which is believed to help them sense their environment and communicate with each other.