Artificial Animals for Computer Animation

This book is based on the author's phD thesis, which won the 1996 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. The author proposes and develops an artificial life paradigm for computer graphics animation by systematically constructing artificial animals controlled by self-animating autonomous agents. The animation agents emulate the realistic appearance, movement, and behavior of individual animals, as well as the patterns of social behavior evident in groups of animals. The paradigm is based on a computational model capturing the essential characteristics common to all biological creatures: biomechanics, locomotion, perception, and behavior. The approach is validated through the implementation of a virtual marine world inhabited by a variety of lifelike artificial fish, where each fish is a functional autonomous agent.

After nearly half a century of research, the Holy Grail of the ?eld of art- cial intelligence (AI) remains a comprehensive computational model capable of emulating the marvelous abilities of animals, including locomotion, p- ception, behavior, manipulation, learning, and cognition. The comprehensive modeling of higher animals humans and other primates remains elusive; However, the research documented in this monograph achieves nothing less than a functional computer model of certain species of lower animals that are by no means trivial in their complexity. Reported herein is the 1996 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award winning work of Xiaoyuan Tu, which she carried out in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Tu presents arti?cial ?shes, a rema- able computational model of familiar marine animals in their natural habitat. Originally conceived in the context of computer graphics, Tu's is to date the only PhD dissertation from this major sub?eld of computer science (and the only thesis from a Canadian university) to win the coveted ACM award.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt
Background.- Functional Anatomy of an Artificial Fish.- Biomechanical Fish Model and Locomotion.- Modeling the Form and Appearance of Fishes.- Perception Modeling.- The Behavior System.- Modeling the Marine Environment.- The Graphical User Interface.- Animation Results.- Conclusion and Future Work.- Epilogue.