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
4701	Farmed Salmon Could Become an Invasive Species in Forest Streams	Underwatertimes	2007-03-08	US
4702	Thames 'clean enough' for salmon	bbc news	2007-03-26	UK
4703	Study: Fish 'Catch Shares' Scheme Reduces By-catch, Increases Per-Boat Revenue, Boosts Safety	Underwatertimes	2007-03-28	US
4704	Chesapeake Bay receives another D+ on health report, due largely to struggling rockfish population	baltimore sun	2021-01-05	US
4705	Royal Navy sends four warships into English Channel	daily mail	2021-01-02	UK
4706	Massive operation nets fleet of illegal fishers	the age	2006-04-06	AU
4707	Gender-changing fish are studied	United Press International	2006-04-11	US
4708	Scientists Try to Count Fish in Sea	Washington Post	2006-04-10	US
4709	30 New Fish Species Discovered On Borneo; 'The More We Look the More We Find'	Underwatertimes	2006-12-19	SW
4710	Climate Change has Surprising Effect on Endangered Naked Carp; 'Metabolic Holiday'	Underwatertimes	2006-12-19	US
4711	Snakeheads Appear at Home in the Potomac	washington post	2006-10-02	US
4712	Farming endangered blue-fin tuna	bbc news	2006-12-27	JP
4713	World First as Endangered Fish Population Recovers; Shortnose Sturgeon Numbers Up 400%	Underwatertimes	2007-02-06	US
4714	Chips plan to keep an eye on fish	bbc news	2006-10-16	CA
4715	Scientists: First Documented Spawning of White Fish in the Detroit River Since 1900s	underwatertimes	2006-10-17	US
4716	Study: Critical Nutrients in Ecosystems Change when Fish Become Extinct	underwatertimes	2007-03-27	CA
4717	'No debate' that fish farms kill wild salmon, says B.C. scientist	CBC News	2006-10-20	CA
4718	A Swarm of Biologically-inspired Little Underwater Explorers	harvard	2021-01-15	US
4719	Scientists discover electric eels hunting in a group	Smithsonian	2021-01-14	BZ
4720	Robot fish equipped with tiny cameras could change ocean rescues	ctvnews	2021-01-13	CA
4721	The B.C. fish you've likely never heard of that's confounding trawlers and officials	CBC News	2021-01-03	US
4722	Thai Fishermen Break Ranks, Vow to Resume Hunt of Endangered Mekong Catfish; 'We Need to Make A Living'	underwatertimes	2006-03-04	TH
4723	Despite rescue effort, Maine salmon may be facing extinction	underwatertimes	2006-01-31	CA
4724	One fish, two fish: New sensor improves fish counts	underwatertimes	2006-02-02	US
4725	Scientists: Evolutionary Origin of Fins, Limbs Discovered; 'This Confirms a Lovely Idea'	underwatertimes	2006-07-26	US

188 of [217 - pages.]