Exploration of underwater life with an acoustically controlled soft robotic fish

By Robert K. Katzschmann, Joseph DelPreto, Robert MacCurdy, Daniela Rus. Science Robotics, 2018

803 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A soft robot fish swims independently in three dimensions and enables studies of aquatic life in natural coral reef habitats. Closeup exploration of underwater life requires new forms of interaction, using biomimetic creatures that are capable of agile swimming maneuvers, equipped with cameras, and supported by remote human operation. Current robotic prototypes do not provide adequate platforms for studying marine life in their natural habitats. This work presents the design, fabrication, control, and oceanic testing of a soft robotic fish that can swim in three dimensions to continuously record the aquatic life it is following or engaging. Using a miniaturized acoustic communication module, a diver can direct the fish by sending commands such as speed, turning angle, and dynamic vertical diving. This work builds on previous generations of robotic fish that were restricted to one plane in shallow water and lacked remote control. Experimental results gathered from tests along coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean show that the robotic fish can successfully navigate around aquatic life at depths ranging from 0 to 18 meters. Furthermore, our robotic fish exhibits a lifelike undulating tail motion enabled by a soft robotic actuator design that can potentially facilitate a more natural integration into the ocean environment. We believe that our study advances beyond what is currently achievable using traditional thruster-based and tethered autonomous underwater vehicles, demonstrating methods that can be used in the future for studying the interactions of aquatic life and ocean dynamics.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e56ebdffee7a163d3753f608e9fba8b1d47e99d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Hilary Bart-Smith
2. George V. Lauder
3. Michael Thomas Tolley

In Mechanical Engineering

1. Hilary Bart-Smith
2. Radhika Nagpal
3. Michael Thomas Tolley

In Ocean Engineering

1. Hilary Bart-Smith
2. George V. Lauder

Citations in the corpus

• Electronics-free pneumatic circuits for controlling soft-legged robots (2021, background): “, by walking (2, 8, 9, 11), crawling (12), rolling (13), slithering (14), swimming (3, 15, 16), peristaltic digging (17, 18), or jumping (19)] have been primarily controlled by pumps and/or solenoid valves connected to an electronic microcontroller.”
• Aligning Cyber Space With Physical World: A Comprehensive Survey on Embodied AI (2024, neutral): “Traditional vSLAM uses image data and multi-view geometry to estimate a robot’s pose and construct low-level maps (e.g., sparse, semi-dense, or dense point clouds) through methods like filter-based approaches (e.g., MonoSLAM [58]), keyframe-based methods (e.g., ORB-SLAM [59]), and direct…”
• Implicit coordination for 3D underwater collective behaviors in a fish-inspired robot swarm (2021, background): “9 of 14 limited to a laboratory setting, the introduction of progressively more powerful and smaller microcomputers, underwater cameras, and new actuators will enable such robots in more complex natural environments (36, 40).”
• Leveraging elastic instabilities for amplified performance: Spine-inspired high-speed and high-force soft robots (2018, background): “Although the bistable hybrid soft swimmer is still slower than biological fishes that typically exhibit a swimming capability of 2 to 10 BL/s (41), future work on optimization of the bistable structure, actuators, springs, and the morphology of the robot hold great potential to fill this gap.”
• Tuna robotics: A high-frequency experimental platform exploring the performance space of swimming fishes (2019, methodology): “Some fish-like robotic systems were free swimming (1, 35, 36), whereas others were attached to external force transducers and/or power supplies, which allow quantitative 1Bio-Inspired Engineering Research Laboratory (BIERL), Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Virginia,”