CAREER: Towards the Creation of a Dynamic Modeling Framework to Generate New Knowledge About Swimming Biological Systems

该学院早期职业发展奖(CARAPE)支持对宽吻海豚的游泳机制有新的了解的研究。研究人员将使用贴在宽吻海豚身上的电子标签收集关于自由游泳的宽吻海豚的行为信息，电子标签可以测量运动和卡路里消耗。收集到的信息，结合数学建模，将导致对海豚游泳的新理解。这样的理解对于减少人类活动对这些动物的影响的政策和管理实践至关重要。这项研究将与教育和推广活动相结合，旨在激励新一代多样化的学生和工程师，并提高人们对生物启发工程系统的社会和环境影响的认识。该项目将通过创建一个新的诊断框架，将游泳的低阶数学模型与来自生物记录标签的运动学数据结合起来，促进对宽吻海豚游泳机制的现有认识。该框架将导致对生物力学参数(如吸盘灵活性和游泳步态)对运动成本的影响的基本科学理解。重要的是，这种新的生物记录模式将使我们能够使用从自由游泳动物身上获得的单点运动学测量来估计游泳的机械成本。这项工作将首次对自由游泳的能量成本进行估算。在这个项目的过程中发展出的新知识将影响生物记录、生物力学和动力系统建模领域。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为是值得支持的。

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports research that will enable new understanding of the swimming mechanics of bottlenose dolphins. Researchers will gather information on the behavior of free-swimming bottlenose dolphins using electronic tags that are attached to the animal and that measure both movement and caloric expenditure. The collected information, combined with mathematical modeling, will lead to new understanding of dolphin swimming. Such an understanding is critical to policy and management practices that reduce the impact of human activities on these animals. This research will be integrated with education and outreach activities that are designed to inspire a new and diverse generation of students and engineers and to raise awareness of the social and environmental implications of bio-inspired engineered systems.This project will advance the current state of knowledge of the swimming mechanics of bottlenose dolphins by creating a novel diagnostic framework that will combine low-order mathematical models of swimming with kinematic data from biologging tags. The framework will lead to a fundamental scientific understanding of the impact of biomechanical parameters, like fluke flexibility and swimming gait, on the cost of locomotion. Importantly, this new bio-logging paradigm will enable us to obtain, using single-point kinematic measurements taken from free-swimming animals, estimates of the mechanical cost of swimming. This work will produce first-of-their-kind estimates of the energetic cost during free swimming. The new knowledge developed over the course of this project will impact the fields of biologging, biomechanics, and the modeling of dynamical systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.