Biological smart sensing strategies in weakly electric fish

Biological sensory systems continuously monitor and analyze changes in real-world environments that are relevant to an animal’s specific behavioral needs and goals. Understanding the sensory mechanisms and information processing principles that biological systems utilize for efficient sensory data acquisition may provide useful guidance for the design of smart-sensing systems in engineering applications. Weakly electric fish, which use self-generated electrical energy to actively sense their environment, provide an excellent model system for studying biological principles of sensory data acquisition. The electrosensory system enables these fish to hunt and navigate at night without the use of visual cues. To achieve reliable, real-time task performance, the electrosensory system implements a number of smart sensing strategies, including efficient stimulus encoding, multi-scale virtual sensor arrays, task-dependent filtering and online subtraction of sensory expectation.