Meeting Abstract
The swimming of a relatively simple vertebrate, the lamprey, can shed light on how a flexible body can couple with a fluid environment to swim rapidly and efficiently. Animals use proprioceptive sensory information to sense how their bodies are bending, and then adjust the neural signals to their muscles to improve performance. We will present recent progress in the development of a integrative, computational model of a swimming lamprey coupled to a Navier-Stokes fluid using an immersed boundary framework. A simple central pattern generator model, based on phase oscillators, is coupled to the evolving body dynamics of the swimmer through curvature feedback. We will examine how the emergent swimming behavior and cost of transport depends upon these functional forms of proprioceptive feedback chosen in the model.
