The bioinspiring potential of weakly electric fish

Abstract

Electric fish are privileged animals for bio-inspiring man-built autonomous systems since they have a multimodal sense that allows underwater navigation, object classification and intraspecific communication. Although there are taxon dependent variations adapted to different environments, this multimodal system can be schematically described as having four main components: active electroreception, passive electroreception, lateral line sense and, proprioception. Amongst these sensory modalities, proprioception and electroreception show ‘active’ systems that extrct information carried by self generated forms of energy. This ensemble of four sensory modalities is present in African mormyriformes and American gymnotiformes. The convergent evolution of similar imaging, peripheral encoding, and central processing mechanisms suggests that these mechanisms may be the most suitable for dealing with electric images in the context of the other and self generated actions. This review deals with the way in which biological organisms address three of the problems that are faced when designing a bioinspired electroreceptive agent: (a) body shape, material and mobility, (b) peripheral encoding of electric images, and (c) early processing of electrosensory signals. Taking into account biological solutions I propose that the new generation of underwater agents should have electroreceptive arms, use complex peripheral sensors for encoding the images and cerebellum like architecture for image feature extraction and implementing sensory-motor transformations.