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
4101	Bones of 'living fossil' found in Texas	Science News	2012-10-24	US
4102	These fish stole an antifreeze gene from another fish and became natural GMOs	CBC News	2021-04-06	CA
4103	A Cruickshank River damn would help alleviate our drought issues	comoxvalleyrecord	2019-05-30	CA
4104	Take a hike, see devastation in the Comox Lake watershed	decafnation	2019-08-05	CA
4105	Angling For More Than A Fish	cvcollective	2021-04-18	CA
4106	Hooking into the Revelstoke fishing scene	Revelstoke Mountaineer Magazine	2017-08-17	CA
4107	Proposed fish farm permits stall while EPA reviews environmental effects	news-press	2021-04-03	US
4108	Taiwan responds to NGO reports on forced labor within its fishing fleet	seafoodsource	2021-04-02	TW
4109	Salmon with sea lice pulled from stores	UPI	2012-10-22	CA
4110	Chesapeake Striped Bass Reproduction At Record Low	baltimore	2012-10-17	US
4111	Michigan Angler Catches Record-Breaking Great Lakes Muskie	detroit.cbslocal	2012-10-20	US
4112	Mystery Florida eyeball is probably from '10ft swordfish', experts say	theguardian	2012-10-12	US
4113	Rare Gold Saury Worth Weight in Actual Gold, Apparently	soranews24	2012-10-05	JP
4114	Cub Scout catches 'monster' in Texas lake	beaumontenterprise	2012-10-05	US
4115	Южнокорейские компании вложат 11,8 млрд руб. в создание рыбного порта в Приморье	interfax	2021-04-14	RU
4116	'Scolded us for being female': Woman says fishing trip prize taken away because she is a woman	chron	2021-03-30	US
4117	Incredible moment fishermen casually cast their lines out as dozens of frenzied sharks thrash in the shallows next to them	dailymail	2021-04-01	UK
4118	State scientists look to purge invasive goldfish from Maine waters	bangordailynews	2012-10-03	IN
4119	Wis. voters favor blocking of Asian carp	UPI	2012-10-02	US
4120	North Sea cod: Is it true there are only 100 left?	BBC News	2012-09-30	CA
4121	'Record-breaking' turbot caught off Shetland	BBC News	2012-09-28	UK
4122	Judge lets fish farm activist off the hook	ctvnews	2012-09-29	CA
4123	Preserving Old Female Cods Key To Population Conservation; 'Don't Seem To Have Aged Physiologically'	Underwatertimes	2012-09-26	SW
4124	Another giant sturgeon caught in Fraser River	CBC News	2012-09-26	CA
4125	Fisherman forced to throw back big tuna fish	CBC News	2012-09-20	CA

164 of [217 - pages.]