Analysing the Motion of Biological Swimmers

Consider a deformable object moving in some medium. In general, one cannot infer the internal deformation of the body based on surface shape alone: it requires detailed knowledge of the mechanical properties and forces operating at every point of the object. And yet, such inverse problems are of considerable practical and fundamental interest in soft matter physics, material science and engineering. We propose that the relatively simple and constrained geometry of the worm C. elegans, and our extensive knowledge of its anatomy and material properties makes the inverse problem tractable. A new and promising approach to the solution of inverse problems is provided by deep learning, which has already transformed performance on standard tasks from across artificial intelligence, particularly in the areas of language and vision, and increasingly now in robotics. The proposed research is to explore the feasibility of using deep learning to understand the internal and external forces acting on the body of C. elegans from video footage of the worm swimming in three dimensional complex fluids.

The research will begin to shed light on the way in which a simple biological swimmer generates propulsion in a liquid medium, and the associated interaction between neural and mechanical systems. This could have a major impact in soft robotics, providing new ways to think about propelling a deformable (soft) robot through water, and the associated control systems. The area of soft robotics is highly promising in creating a new generation of flexible robots that are highly agile, resilient to unpredictable external forces, low-powered, compact and low-cost. Such robots have many potential applications, for example, they could be used in monitoring chemical manufacturing processes; they could be used in remote underwater environments to monitor the safety of water supplies; and they could be used in the maintenance of infrastructure.

More generally, the research will contribute to the international effort to gain a full understand of a single biological life form - C. elegans. Such an understanding will shed light on biological movement control in general, with potential impact on human medicine, and all of robotics.