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Biologically Inspired Robotics
5.1 Introduction
In nature, fish propel themselves by bending their bodies and/or using their
fins and have gained astonishing swim and maneuvering abilities after
thousands years of evolution. For instance, the tuna swims with high speed
and high efficiency, the pike accelerates in a flash, and the eel can swim skillfully into narrow holes. This has inspired many robotics researchers to build
new types of aquatic man-made systems, namely, robotic fish. Instead of
the conventional rotary propeller used in ships or underwater vehicles, a
robotic fish relies on undulation or oscillatory movements to generate the
main propulsion energy. It is clear that this kind of propulsion is less noisy
and more maneuverable than man-made underwater vehicles.
RoboTuna was the first robotic fish developed at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in 1994 (Streitlien, Triantafyllou, and Triantafyllou 1996) to
explore and understand the biology of aquatic creatures. Since then, many
kinds of robotic fishes have been developed worldwide. A robotic lamprey
using shape memory alloy (SMA; Jalbert, Kashin, and Ayers 1995) was built
at Northwestern University, with the aim to realize mine countermeasures.
In Japan, a micro-robotic fish was developed at Nagoya University using an
ionic conducting polymer film (ICPF) actuator (Guo et al. 1998) and Tokai
University constructed a robotic Blackbass (Kato 2000) to research the propulsion of pectoral fins. The National Maritime Research Institute (NMRI)
has developed many kinds of robotic fish prototypes, from PF300 to PPF-09,
to exploit the effective swimming mode. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries built
a robotic fish to mimic an extinct fish, namely, coelacanth (Yamamoto and
Terada 2003). Most of the current robotic fish can only operate in the laboratory, swimming on the water surface, and are not robust enough for daily
operation in the real world.
The Essex Robotics Research Group has worked on robotic fish research
since 2003, aiming to design and build autonomous robotic fish that would
have three major features: to (1) swim like a real fish; (2) realize autonomous
navigation; and (3) be deployed in real-world applications (Liu and Hu 2010).
Most important, the robotic fish we built should be able to swim in three
dimensions within an unknown and dynamically changing environment
and should be fully autonomous in daily operations. Also, it will be able to be
deployed for real-world applications such as water pollution monitoring and
security surveillance. This chapter is focused on the biologically inspired
design of our autonomous robotic fish; that is, how the basic fish swimming
behaviors have been realized in our robotic fish, as well as its application to
pollution detection in a seaport.
The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. Inspired from nature,
Section 5.2 describes fish swimming behaviors and their division in terms of
propulsion mechanism and temporal features. Section 5.3 presents the biologically inspired design of Essex robotic fish and Section 5.4 describes novel
Biologically Inspired Robotics
5.1 Introduction
In nature, fish propel themselves by bending their bodies and/or using their
fins and have gained astonishing swim and maneuvering abilities after
thousands years of evolution. For instance, the tuna swims with high speed
and high efficiency, the pike accelerates in a flash, and the eel can swim skillfully into narrow holes. This has inspired many robotics researchers to build
new types of aquatic man-made systems, namely, robotic fish. Instead of
the conventional rotary propeller used in ships or underwater vehicles, a
robotic fish relies on undulation or oscillatory movements to generate the
main propulsion energy. It is clear that this kind of propulsion is less noisy
and more maneuverable than man-made underwater vehicles.
RoboTuna was the first robotic fish developed at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in 1994 (Streitlien, Triantafyllou, and Triantafyllou 1996) to
explore and understand the biology of aquatic creatures. Since then, many
kinds of robotic fishes have been developed worldwide. A robotic lamprey
using shape memory alloy (SMA; Jalbert, Kashin, and Ayers 1995) was built
at Northwestern University, with the aim to realize mine countermeasures.
In Japan, a micro-robotic fish was developed at Nagoya University using an
ionic conducting polymer film (ICPF) actuator (Guo et al. 1998) and Tokai
University constructed a robotic Blackbass (Kato 2000) to research the propulsion of pectoral fins. The National Maritime Research Institute (NMRI)
has developed many kinds of robotic fish prototypes, from PF300 to PPF-09,
to exploit the effective swimming mode. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries built
a robotic fish to mimic an extinct fish, namely, coelacanth (Yamamoto and
Terada 2003). Most of the current robotic fish can only operate in the laboratory, swimming on the water surface, and are not robust enough for daily
operation in the real world.
The Essex Robotics Research Group has worked on robotic fish research
since 2003, aiming to design and build autonomous robotic fish that would
have three major features: to (1) swim like a real fish; (2) realize autonomous
navigation; and (3) be deployed in real-world applications (Liu and Hu 2010).
Most important, the robotic fish we built should be able to swim in three
dimensions within an unknown and dynamically changing environment
and should be fully autonomous in daily operations. Also, it will be able to be
deployed for real-world applications such as water pollution monitoring and
security surveillance. This chapter is focused on the biologically inspired
design of our autonomous robotic fish; that is, how the basic fish swimming
behaviors have been realized in our robotic fish, as well as its application to
pollution detection in a seaport.
The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. Inspired from nature,
Section 5.2 describes fish swimming behaviors and their division in terms of
propulsion mechanism and temporal features. Section 5.3 presents the biologically inspired design of Essex robotic fish and Section 5.4 describes novel