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
4401	It's time to think about hauling ice fishing shacks away	CBC News	2021-03-04	CA
4402	National Chief Bellegarde urges Ottawa to rethink Mi'kmaq fisheries decision	CBC News	2021-03-05	CA
4403	Want to know how fish see the world? Build them a TV…	sciencefocus	2021-02-18	CA
4404	Prestigious Journal Validates Asian Carp Researc	underwatertimes	2011-01-05	US
4405	Japan new year tuna sale sets price record	BBC News	2011-01-05	JP
4406	Catfish Study Reveals Importance Of Being 'Similar But Different'	underwatertimes	2011-01-05	BR
4407	Thousands of fish washed up dead in Chicago in latest bizarre mass animal deaths	mirror	2011-01-11	UK
4408	NOAA To Work With Six Nations To Address Illegal, Unreported, And Unregulated Fishing	Underwatertimes	2011-01-12	CA
4409	The freshwater fish fight	theguardian	2011-01-17	UK
4410	Closed-pen salmon farm launches in B.C.	CBC News	2011-01-17	CA
4411	Meet the robotic ghost knifefish, the cyberfish who will tame the roiling seas	gizmodo	2011-01-19	US
4412	Chef creates meals featuring invasive Asian carp	Milwaukee Journal Sentinel	2011-01-23	CA
4413	Bass Angler Christiana Bradley Has Learning Experience In Florida	underwatertimes	2011-01-25	US
4414	Монстр из Ахтубы	yandex	2020-09-11	RU
4415	Young Islander builds ice fishing shack, hopes for winter catches	CBC News	2021-02-21	CA
4416	Monduran monster's a world record	news-mail	2010-12-23	AU
4417	Wild Salmon Decline Was Not Caused By Sea Lice From Farm Salmon	underwatertimes	2010-12-13	US
4418	Angler's 405.2-pound yellowfin tuna is largest ever caught	petethomasoutdoors	2010-12-06	US
4419	Angler lands world's biggest carp... the day after best friend caught another huge fish on same lake	dailymail	2010-12-06	FR
4420	Washington fish hatchery research shows circular tanks result in buff salmon and steelhead	oregonlive	2010-01-10	US
4421	Freshwater fish are in "catastrophic" decline with one-third facing extinction, report finds	cbsnews	2021-02-23	GR
4422	Waves of fish mortalities attributed to cold weather	kristv	2021-02-19	US
4423	Fish farms stir emotions	castanet	2021-02-20	CA
4424	The feeding of the 5,000? Not quite, but pensioner lands record-breaking halibut	daily mail	2010-11-23	UK
4425	Fish Are More Intelligent Than Previously Thought	Underwatertimes	2010-11-16	US

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