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
4526	The odd Hawaiianfish that Climb Cliffs	BBC News	2021-02-10	US
4527	Taranaki workmates land massive fish on tiny 'undersize' boat	stuff	2021-02-10	NZ
4528	Fish Kill: Nanosilver Mutates Fish Embryos	scientificamerican	2009-11-17	US
4529	95-pound catfish caught in Ohio	Odd News	2009-11-11	US
4530	Farming Fish in the Sky	hakaimagazine	2021-02-08	SG
4531	Missouri man fined more than $6,000 for possessing fish over the legal limit	tbnewswatch	2021-02-05	US
4532	Ask Dr. Universe: How can you tell if a fish is female or male?	spokesman	2021-02-07	US
4533	Biologist calls for judicial inquiry on salmon decline	ctvbc	2009-10-03	CA
4534	How do you train a fish?	BBC News	2009-10-02	US
4535	A New Chemical Method For Distinguishing Between Farmed And Wild Salmon	underwatertimes	2009-09-30	UK
4536	Something fishy happening at Centennial Park	smh	2009-09-21	AU
4537	Fishing for prehistoric quarry	bbc	2009-08-19	US
4538	Robotic Applications Eyed As Scientists Decode Mathematics Behind Fish's Lateral-line System	underwatertimes	2009-08-28	CA
4539	Seafood surprise: could rebranding this ugly fish as ‘Cornish sole’ make Brits eat it?	the guardian	2021-02-09	UK
4540	Florida fishermen catch a Warsaw Grouper that was bigger than a man: ‘It was a monster’	Fox News	2021-02-17	US
4541	Four-year study suggests only a third of tagged fish made it through Whitehorse fish ladder	yukon news	2021-02-09	CA
4542	Orchid Islanders face charges for catching endangered fish in Taiwan	Taiwan News	2021-02-10	TW
4543	Invasive Asian carp is getting a new name and a public makeover to draw more eaters	usatoday	2009-02-08	US
4544	Crackdown on illegal fish netting	bbc	2009-08-17	UK
4545	Corps scrambling to turn up voltage on carp barrier	Journal Sentinel	2009-11-08	US
4546	Angler's catch weighs more than his boat	al	2009-03-28	US
4547	The tiddler who caught a monster: Schoolgirl angler nets record catch that's twice her size and weighs 14stone	Daily Mail	2009-07-15	UK
4548	The Alligator Gar Is One Ugly Fish, With Few Friends but New Fans	The Wall Street	2009-07-30	US
4549	Huge Fish, Once Believed Extinct, Isn’t the ‘Living Fossil’ Scientists Thought	gizmodo	2021-02-10	AU
4550	Hundreds of fish species, including many that humans eat, are consuming plastic	theconversation	2021-02-09	CA

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