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
4801	Escaped farmed salmon find home in Alaska	sitnews	2004-08-26	US
4802	Minnesota Couple Wins New Bass Cat In B.A.S.S. Sweepstakes	fishingworld	2020-12-08	US
4803	Finding Nemo …How do fish find and recognise ’friends’?	innovations-report	2004-01-12	UK
4804	Fisherman lands £8,000 catch	bbc news	2004-06-02	UK
4805	Rivers protected to save salmon	bbc news	2004-06-02	UK
4806	Sturgeon heads for new home	bbc news	2004-06-08	UK
4807	Wild salmon still 'in jeopardy'	bbc news	2004-07-03	UK
4808	Israeli company develops environmentally friendly fish cage system	globes	2004-06-01	IL
4809	3 fishermen survive 5 days lost at sea on raw fish, rainwater	newsday	2020-12-15	TT
4810	Ontario Fishing Regulation Changes for 2021	Fish'n Canada	2020-12-17	CA
4811	Fish farms on key B.C. salmon migration route to be phased out by 2022	The Canadian Press	2020-12-18	CA
4812	Saguenay Fjord winter recreational groundfish fishery	canada.ca	2020-12-22	CA
4813	Scientists support endangered sturgeon	usatoday30	2004-12-18	CA
4814	Aquatic scientists divided on role of sea lice from salmon farms in decline of native salmon in B.C.	EUREKA	2004-03-03	CA
4815	Scare over farmed salmon safety	bbc news	2004-01-08	US
4816	Tracking fish by sonar to prevent over-fishing	EUREKA	2003-10-14	CA
4817	Antarctic fish study may aid cardiac research	eurekalert	2004-03-30	CA
4818	Farmed sturgeon 'only hope for caviar'	bbc news	2002-12-02	KZ
4819	Snakeheads, other invaders cost billions	cnn	2002-09-24	CA
4820	DDT found in trout from Lake Chelan	ROBERT MCCLURE AND LISA STIFFLER	2003-10-18	US
4821	Americans and Vietnamese Fighting Over Catfish	nytimes	2003-11-05	US
4822	Tiny salmon trapped as dam operators cut flows downriver	seattle pi	2003-03-13	CA
4823	North Sea cod 'face commercial end'	bbc news	2002-12-16	CA
4824	State's ban on gene-altered fish a first	seattle pi	2002-12-22	US
4825	Maryland state officials start poisoning alien snakehead fish	usa today	2002-08-18	SG

192 of [217 - pages.]