A Swarm of Biologically-inspired Little Underwater Explorers

A Swarm of Biologically-inspired Little Underwater Explorers

By Florian Berlinger, Melvin Gauci, Jeff Dusek

Source: harvard

1/15/2021

Florian Berlinger, Melvin Gauci, Jeff Dusek

The natural world abounds with self-organizing collectives, where large numbers of relatively simple agents use local interactions to produce impressive global behaviors. Fish schools are particularly impressive – collectives of thousands migrate long distances, search for resources, and even form dynamic shapes like flash expansions or bait balls to evade predators or capture prey. Even more inspiring are the fish schools that move within coral reefs, navigating together in complex cluttered environments. These biological collectives exhibit several properties that are highly desirable from an engineering perspective: they are decentralized, providing robustness to failure of agents, and they rely primarily on local sensing and nearest neighbor interactions, exhibiting high degrees of scalability and adaptability.

The goal of the BlueSwarm Project is to develop a novel 3D swarm testbed inspired by reef fish schools: An underwater robot collective, with 30+ fully-autonomous miniature (~10cm) robots, that use purely local communication and sensing to demonstrate complex global 3D coordination, inspired by the kinds of complexity that coral reef fish schools achieve.

This new project has three main thrusts: (a) The development of an underwater robot swarm platform, with miniature (~10cm) but highly maneuverable underwater robots. (b) The development of algorithms and programming methodologies to create complex global-to-local 3D collective behaviors using implicit coordination. (c) Using BlueSwarm robots to understand fish biomechanics and schooling. See our recent publications and movie links below for current progress.

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News Id		Source	Stamp	country
4051	Lake Of The Woods Walleye Population In Dire Straits	fishncanada	2021-04-26	CA
4052	Thompson steelhead trapped at bottom of Bonaparte River fishway	ashcroftcachecreekjournal	2019-04-11	CA
4053	Flood warning issued for Bonaparte River, nearly 200 Cache Creek homes on evacuation alert	radionl	2020-07-04	CA
4054	На больших глубинах обнаружено неожиданное разнообразие жизни	habr	2021-04-28	RU
4055	Wildlife managers use underwater noise, herding techniques to trap invasive carp	spectrumnews1	2021-04-12	US
4056	China awards 91 fishermen for capturing foreign spy devices since 2016	Global Times	2021-04-15	CN
4057	100 fishermen ticketed for catching too many fish or fish of wrong size	nj	2021-04-16	US
4058	Fish farm developers brand loch protesters 'a nest of vipers'	heraldscotland	2013-01-12	UK
4059	Guernsey aquarium thief used fish to win competition	BBC News	2013-01-10	US
4060	Pike found choked on zander in Netherlands	BBC News	2013-01-10	NL
4061	Computerized fishing rod won't put worms on hooks	cnet	2013-01-04	CA
4062	Greens now betray the wild fish	canadafreepress	2013-01-04	US
4063	The adventure interview: Jeremy Wade	telegraph	2013-01-01	US
4064	True facts about the anglerfish	gizmodo	2012-12-28	US
4065	Transgenic fish wins US regulatory backing A fast-growing salmon moves closer to approval after a fishy delay.	nature	2012-12-22	US
4066	Fisherman towed out to sea while catching record 29lb fish	telegraph	2012-12-21	US
4067	Mesh pens don't overcrowd salmon: MUN researcher	CBC News	2012-12-20	CA
4068	Tay salmon anglers accused of harassing canoeists	The Courier Reporter	2012-12-18	UK
4069	Proposal to prohibit use of carbon monoxide as a fish processing aid	voxy	2012-12-18	NZ
4070	PolitiFact calls claims of menhaden declines “Mostly False”, is completely wrong	southernfriedscience	2012-12-17	US
4071	Truck driver records collision with giant fish falling from sky	usatoday	2021-04-16	CA
4072	Changing environment may be to blame for reduced fish populations	thecordovatimes	2021-04-09	CA
4073	3 people banned from fishing anywhere in Canada after overfishing violations near Nootka Sound	CBC News	2021-04-11	CA
4074	NOAA needs leader who can talk to fishermen	bostonglobe	2012-12-17	US
4075	Blind cat fish species discovered	BBC Tamil Service	2012-12-13	CA

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