September 4, 2018 — Using lessons learned from harbor seals and artificial intelligence, engineers in California may be on to a new way to track enemy submarines.
The idea started with research published in 2001 on the seals.
Scientists at the University of Bonn in Germany showed that blindfolded seals could still track a robotic fish. The researchers concluded that the seals did this by detecting the strength and direction of the whirling vortex the robot created as it swam through the water.
Subsequent research showed that the seal used its whiskers as sensors to detect the flow patterns.
Eva Kanso, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Southern California, is interested in how animals use water flows to guide their behavior. It’s an academic puzzle for Kanso, but a very real, very practical question for a harbor seal.
“The animal wants to understand — is it a prey that created this vortex, or is it a predator that created this flow pattern?” she says.
Kanso and her colleagues have been trying to emulate the seals’ ability to make those distinctions.