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
4301	Salmon And Other Fish Predators Rely On No Guts, No Glory Survival Tactic	underwatertimes	2011-09-15	US
4302	Climate change boon to UK seafood	BBC News	2011-09-15	UK
4303	World's largest fishing lure, at 355 pounds, is a real whopper	petethomasoutdoors	2011-09-13	US
4304	Ancient Toothy Fish Found in Arctic—Giant Prowled Rivers	National Geographic News	2011-09-12	US
4305	The World's Worst Place To Catch Fish	Underwatertimes	2011-09-07	US
4306	Colossal Aggregations Of Giant Alien Freshwater Fish As A Potential Biogeochemical Hotspot	Underwatertimes	2011-10-06	GE
4307	Iceland joins alliance to tackle ‘ghost’ fishing gear abandoned at sea	thegrocer	2021-03-10	UK
4308	Dozens change name to salmon	Taipei Times	2021-03-18	TW
4309	Рыбаки предупредили о возможных сбоях в добыче самой дешевой рыбы	rbc	2021-03-17	RU
4310	Nearly 4 million fish killed by winter storm along Texas coast	fox4news	2021-03-10	US
4311	Scientists Discover an 81-Year-Old Snapper	hakaimagazine	2021-03-04	AU
4312	Florida biologists find a live turtle inside a fish	timesnownews	2011-09-06	US
4313	Underground For Millions Of Years, Blind Cave Fish Tell Time On Biological Clocks	Underwatertimes	2011-09-06	CA
4314	Chile Says No To Salmon Farming Off Tierra Del Fuego	Underwatertimes	2011-09-01	CL
4315	Re-Emergence Of Salmon In The Thames Not From Restocking	Underwatertimes	2011-09-02	UK
4316	Angler reels in giant 185lb catfish by himself after friends head to the bar	dailymail	2011-08-30	SP
4317	For the first time, a river is granted official rights and legal personhood in Canada	newswire	2021-02-23	CA
4318	Quebec’s Magpie River first in Canada to be granted personhood	esemag	2021-03-16	CA
4319	A Canadian River Has Been Legally Declared A Person & It's A First For This Country	narcity	2021-02-25	CA
4320	Quebec's Magpie River becomes first in Canada to be granted legal personhood	nationalobserver	2021-02-24	CA
4321	Quebec river granted legal rights as part of global personhood movement	CBC News	2021-02-28	CA
4322	We asked men with fish pictures in their Tinder profile: Why?	thetab	2021-03-03	UK
4323	Bizarre fish evolved for the oceans — but lives on land	gizmodo	2011-08-30	FM
4324	Exotic fish to replace cod	telegraph	2011-08-27	UK
4325	The Same Number Of Fishermen, But Less Salmon In Spanish Rivers	underwatertimes	2011-08-26	SP

172 of [217 - pages.]