Robotic Fishbot Moves Like a Real Fish

Mar-16-14 MIT researchers have developed a soft robot ‘fish’ able to change direction as quickly as a real fish, further expanding the field of soft-robotics.

The fishbot is equipped with a flexible, silicon rubber tail that has been bored through to create a long, undulating channel. When carbon dioxide, stored in a container in the robot’s body, is released into to the channel, it causes the channel to inflate and bend the tail in the opposite direction. The angle at which the fish changes direction is determined almost entirely by the duration of the inflation, and the fish’s speed is determined by the diameter of the nozzle. The fishbot’s soft body allows it to perform incredibly quick “escape maneuvers” by using a burst of CO2 to suddenly change directions by as much a 100 degrees in 100 milliseconds.

According to Barry Trimmer, a biology professor at Tufts University who specializes in biomimetic soft robots, the robot fish is an excellent example of the premise of soft robotics, which involves working with uncertainty but still controlling the machines. The MIT researchers’ robot fish is “an early stage of saying, ‘We know the actuator isn’t giving us all the control we’d like, but can we actually still exploit it to get the performance we want?’ And they’re able to show that yes, they can.”

More Info about this Invention:

[POPSCI.COM]
[MIT]

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