Animal Simulation Laboratory

Animal Simulation Laboratory: Fossils, Physics and Physiology

Thursday, 06 November 2008 21:45 Bill Sellers

Welcome to the Animal Simulation Laboratory based in the Adaptive Organismal Biology research group at the Faculty of Life Sciences, The University of Manchester. 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 currently locomotor biomechanics. GaitSym, our main simulation program, is available open source and has reached version 2. It can be downloaded from this site. You can find out about people working on various projects on our Wiki.

Last Updated on Sunday, 20 December 2009 19:15 Read more...

Black Throated Diver

Friday, 15 January 2010 10:28 Bill Sellers

This is a black throated diver that was CT scanned by Martin Baker at the Small Animal Teaching Hospital, University of Liverpool and rendered by Bill Sellers at ASL. It is freely available for general use as long as its origin is acknowledged. The scan is available as the raw DICOM files and also as a rendered movie.

Rendered frame

Last Updated on Friday, 15 January 2010 10:45 Read more...

GaitSym V2.0.0

Thursday, 12 November 2009 13:57 Bill Sellers

BILL SELLERS

GaitSym is a forward dynamic modelling program. What that means is that you specify the forces and the program uses Newton's Laws to calculate the movements. You can download it from here including a range of human and non-human 2D and 3D models to get you started. It uses the Open Dynamics Engine physics engine to do most of the hard work and provides a file format and display system so the user does not have to do any programming. It also provides various muscle models so that the forces can be generated directly from muscle activation levels and a number of hooks to allow it to be used with global optimisation tools such as genetic algorithms.

Last Updated on Friday, 15 January 2010 15:02 Read more...

Dinosaurs hop, skip and jump into 21st century

Tuesday, 01 December 2009 17:31 Bill Sellers

Dinosaur locomotion: "Four legs good, two legs better?"

Everyone knows that dinosaurs come in all shapes and sizes. Most don't look like anything that's alive today and some are just plain bizarre. One group that fit this description well are the duck-billed dinosaurs (aka hadrosaurs). Along with the strange appearance (the eponymous duck-bill, peculiar skull ornaments, and long, slender forelimbs) scientists have argued about how they might have moved: Did they walk on four limbs, two limbs, or a combination of both depending on the speed? It has even been suggested that some may have hopped like a kangaroo!

Last Updated on Friday, 15 January 2010 15:10 Read more...

Estimating dinosaur maximum running speeds using evolutionary robotics

Monday, 01 January 2007 00:00 Bill Sellers

W. I. SELLERS, P. L. MANNING

Originally in Proceedings Of The Royal Society B-Biological Sciences (2007) vol. 274 (1626) pp. 2711-2716. DOWNLOAD PDF

Note: The models and software used in this paper can be downloaded from the downloads section of this site.

Maximum running speed is an important locomotor parameter for many animals - predators as well as prey - and is thus of interest to palaeobiologists wishing to reconstruct the behavioural ecology of extinct species.

Last Updated on Wednesday, 11 February 2009 07:48 Read more...

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Animal Simulation Laboratory