Biomimicry and fuzzy modeling: A match made in heaven

Biomimicry, the design of artificial systems that mimic natural behavior, is recently attracting considerable interest. Biomimicry requires a reverse engineering process; the behavior of a biological agent is analyzed in order to mimic this behavior in an artificial system. In many cases, biologists have already studied the relevant behavior and provided a detailed verbal description of it. Mimicking the natural behavior can then be reduced to the following problem: how can we convert the given verbal description into a well-defined mathematical formula or algorithm that can be implemented by an artificial system? Fuzzy modeling (FM), with its ability to handle and manipulate verbal information, constitutes a natural approach for addressing this problem. The application of FM in this context may lead to a systematic approach for biomimcry, namely, given a verbal description of an animal's behavior (e.g., the foraging behavior of ants), apply FM to obtain a mathematical model of this behavior which can be implemented by artificial systems (e.g., autonomous robots). The purpose of this position paper is to highlight these issues and to alert the attention of the computational intelligence community to this emerging application of FM.