The valleys represent efficient swimming behavior, that is, the least effort for the most speed and distance, as represented by equations of motion. The programmer encourages the marbles to roll into lower valleys without undoing the learning that has already been accomplished. The speed with which visual images can be processed is one of the chief limitations for autonomous robots. For this reason, simplification of those images has become the goal of Rabie, who has given the fish a simplified computer vision system to save on unnecessary computation. The fish have a high-resolution view of their world only at the center of their visual field, the fovea, much as we do.
Peripheral vision is at lower resolution, which makes visual responses much faster.
Images are processed by the brain and direct the eyes to focus where the action is-much like the real eyes of other vertebrates, such as ourselves. In Canada, as in other countries, funding agencies are pushing for concrete applications that will advance industry and stimulate the economy. If swimming, learning, and autonomy could be realized in a physical model, this could pave the way for the development of agile, intelligent marine-transport vehicles. In fact, the Toronto group firmly believes that autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs, could be built with existing technology. Terzopoulos also hastened to point out that this is precisely the goal of a research team at MIT led by Michael Triantafyllou, professor of ocean engineering.