School of Robofish provides basis for underwater r...(r Force Office of Scientific Research. ...)

The Robofish, which are roughly the size of a 10-pound salmon, look a bit like fish because they use fins rather than propellers. The fins make them potentially more maneuverable and are thought to create lower drag than propeller-driven vehicles.

But while other research groups are building fishlike robots, what's novel with this system is that the robotic fish can communicate wirelessly underwater. Again, Morgansen looked to natural systems for inspiration. The engineers worked with collaborator Julia Parrish, an associate professor in the UW's School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, to record patterns of fish schools' behavior.

"In schooling and herding animals, you can get much more efficient maneuvers and smoother behaviors than what we can do in engineering right now," Morgansen explained. "The idea of these experiments (with schools of live fish) is to ask, 'How are they doing it?' and see if we can come up with some ideas."

The team trained some live fish to respond to a stimulus by swimming to the feeding area. The scientists discovered that even when less than a third of the fish were trained, the whole school swam to the feeding area on cue.

"The fish that have a strong idea tend to dominate over those that don't," Morgansen said. "That has implications for what will happen in a group of vehicles. Can one vehicle make the rest of the group do something just based on its behavior?"

Beyond finding the optimal way to coordinate movement of the robots, the researchers faced major challenges in having robots transmit information through dense water.

"When you're underwater you run into problems with not being able to send a lot of data," Morgansen said. State of the art is 80 bytes, or about 32 numbers, per second, she said.

The energy required to send the information over long distances is prohibitive because the robots have limited battery power.
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