ASL Home Page

STOP PRESS: A new set of simulations will be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Wednesday 22nd August 2007. More details will be forthcoming when the media embargo is lifted.

Welcome to the Animal Simulation Laboratory. Our goal is the creation of virtual worlds that can be used for exploring adaptation and evolutionary processes. This is a long term, large scale project and will require contributions from scientists around the world to make it a useful reality. However there are a number of components that will be required for the virtual world to be a useful tool that we are currently working on. Our main focus is therefore locomotor biomechanics. We are creating computer simulations of a number of animals and using them to investigate how they move and to extract details about their locomotor capabilties. We appreciate that simply creating simulations is not terribly useful so where possible we validate our simulations against experimental data. We are also looking at how groups of animals interact with each other and with their environments so that we can start to give our simulations the necessary behavioural repertoires for them to be able to survive in their virtual environments. This includes locomotion, foraging, resting and social behaviour.

Our computer simulations use physics simulators to model mechanical processes and we use various artifical intelligence techniques to produce the behaviours we are interested in: genetic algorithms, agent based modelling, neural networks. Our simulations take a great deal of computer time to run so are designed to work in a parallel fashion. This way multiple computers can work on the problem at the same time which greatly reduces the time taken. Our current implementation is running on a Linux-based Beowulf Cluster but we have also tested versions on MacOSX, Windows, Irix and Solaris.

Since this is potentially such a big project we welcome suggestions for collaboration. We are already working on a wide range of animals (primates, elephants, horses, dinosaurs) but realise that we need to include other groups (in particular invertebrates). We also need to work on interoperability so that we can ultimately construct an open virtual world that can incorporate a wide range of simulations.

Please check out the rest of the site to see the current projects we are working on, how to get in touch with us, our publications and our collaborators. Anyone interested in working with us is welcome to visit. We would perticularly welcome anyone interested in PhDs or the new Masters in Biomechanics to contact us.