Artificial fishes: physics, locomotion, perception, behavior

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a framework for animation that can achieve the intricacy of motion evident in certain natural ecosystems with minimal input from the animator. The realistic appearance, movement, and behavior of individual animals, as well as the patterns of behavior evident in groups of animals fall within the scope of the framework. Our approach to emulating this level of natural complexity is to model each animal holistically as an autonomous agent situated in its physical world. To demonstrate the approach, we develop a physics-based, virtual marine world. The world is inhabited by artificial fishes that can swim hydrodynamically in simulated water through the motor control of internal muscles that motivates fins. Their repertoire of behaviors relies on their perception of the dynamic environment. As in nature, the detailed motions of artificial fishes in their virtual habitat are not entirely predictable because they are not scripted.

References

1. 1.H. E. Adler. Fish Behavior: Why Fishes do What They Do. T.F.H Publications, Neptune City, NJ, 1975.
2. 2.N. Badler, B. Barsky, and D. Zeltzer, editors. Making Them Move. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 1991.
3. 3.V. Braitenberg. Vehicles, Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1984.
4. 4.S. Levy. Artificial Life. Vintage Books, NY, 1992.
5. 5.K. Lorenz. Foundations of Ethology. Springer-Verlag, New York, 1973.
6. 6.P. Maes, editor. Designing Autonomous Agents. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991.
7. 7.D. Mcfarland. Animal Behaviour. Pitman, 1985.
8. 8.M. McKenna, S. Pieper, and D. Zeltzer. Control of a virtual actor: The roach. ACM SIGGRAPH 1990Symposiumon Interactive 3DGraphics, 24(2):165-174, 1990.
9. 9.G. S. P. Miller. The motion dynamics of snakes and worms. Computer Graphics, 22(4):169-177, 1988.
10. 10.W. Press, B. Flannery, S. Teukolsky, and W. Vetterling. Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1986.
11. 11.M. H. Raibert and J. K. Hodgins. Animation of dynamic legged locomotion. Computer Graphics, 25(4):349-358, 1991.
12. 12.O. Renault, N. Magnenat-Thalmann, and D. Thalmann. A vision-based approach to behavioural animation. Visualization and Computer Animation, 1:18-21, 1990.
13. 13.C. W. Reynolds. Flocks, herds, and schools: A distributed behavioral model. Computer Graphics, 21(4):25-34, 1987.
14. 14.D. Terzopoulos and K Waters. Physically-based facial modelling, analysis, and animation. Visulization and Computer Animation, 1:73- 80, 1990.
15. 15.R. E. Thresher. Reproduction in Reef Fishes. T.F.H. Publications, Neptune City, NJ, 1984.
16. 16.N. Tinbergen. The Study of Instinct. Clarendon Press, Oxford, England, 1950.
17. 17.X. Tu and D. Terzopoulos. Perceptual modeling for behavioral ani-mation of fishes. In Proc. 2nd Pacific Conf. on Computer Graphics, Beijing, China, 1994.
18. 18.X. Tu, D. Terzopoulos, and E. Fiume. Go Fish! ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review Issue 91: SIGGRAPH'93 Electronic Theater, 1993.
19. 19.P. W. Webb. Form and function in fish swimming. Scientific American, 251(1), 1989.
20. 20.J. Wilhelms and R. Skinner. A "notion" for interactive behavioral ani-mation control. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 10(3):14- 22, 1990.
21. 21.R. Wilson and J. Q. Wilson. Watching Fishes. Harper and Row, New York, 1985.
22. 22.D. Zeltzer. Motor control techniques for figure animation. IEEE Computer Graphics and Application, 2(9):53-59, 1982.

Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Computer graphics

    • Animation

      • Physical simulation

    • Shape modeling

• Mathematics of computing

  • Continuous mathematics

    • Topology

      • Geometric topology