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
4226	Florida Law Makes Serving Local Fish an Increasing Challenge	browardpalmbeach	2012-03-15	US
4227	Japan's Tsunami-Stricken Fishermen Chart New Course		2012-03-14	JP
4228	Malaysian fisherman released after three-and-half-year prison sentence	the borneo post	2012-03-13	MY
4229	St. Lawrence River named best place to fish in the country	7 News	2021-03-20	US
4230	Historic River Pollution Threatens Coastal Great Lakes Fish	Associated Press	2021-03-28	US
4231	Black fish was rife in industry across Scotland for decades, says convicted fisherman	shetlandtimes	2012-03-02	UK
4232	What Makes A Robot Fish Attractive? Hint: It's In The Moves	Underwatertimes	2012-03-01	US
4233	Puffer fish chases laser in viral video	Kim I. Hartman	2012-02-25	US
4234	Robot fish prototype leads school of real fish behind it	theverge	2012-02-24	US
4235	Royal fish returns after 46 years at sea	independent	2012-02-19	IE
4236	Fish hybridise themselves extinct in Alpine lakes	newscientist	2012-02-16	CH
4237	Marine Scientists Awarded Grant To Study Ciguatera Fish Poisoning	underwatertimes	2012-02-15	US
4238	First-time angler catches record-breaking fish in English Channel	metro	2012-02-15	UK
4239	Resident recounts the trip water takes from local hills to the ocean	VMS	2016-07-13	CA
4240	A Community Coming Together for Kokanee Conservation	bcfishn	2021-03-28	CA
4241	Salmon farms instigate open door policy for welfare inspectors	The Fish Site	2021-03-25	UK
4242	Reducing global warming matters for freshwater fish species	Radboud University Nijmegen	2021-03-15	NL
4243	Indiana angler catches record-breaking whitefish	foxnews	2021-03-22	US
4244	Missouri angler catches 112-pound invasive black carp	foxnews	2021-03-26	US
4245	Tribes Call on Biden, Congress to Remove Snake River Dams	Associated Press	2021-03-25	CA
4246	Fisherman in Ukraine reels in boy, 11, who got himself stuck on sheet of ice, video shows	foxnews	2021-03-24	UA
4247	Scottish fish farming companies given millions in grants despite huge profits	thenational	2021-03-14	UK
4248	Anti-Freeze Fish Of Antarctica Threatened By Climate Change	Underwatertimes	2012-02-13	CA
4249	Petition Seeks International Investigation Of Canadas Farmed Fish Operations	underwatertimes	2012-02-07	CA
4250	Calif. salmon return is encouraging	upi	2012-02-03	CA

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