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
1	Canada Anglers To Be Fined $100,000 If They Release Smallmouth Bass	whiskeyriff	2024-09-18	CA
2	Salmon farmer backs beach cleans	thefishsite	2024-09-19	UK
3	A Sturgeon goes to Wisconsin and a Michigan muskie visits New York	great lakes now	2024-09-16	US
4	Вице-премьер Патрушев рассказал, что даст реформа рыбной отрасли	RG	2024-09-18	RU
5	Fishing captain pulls rabbit out of his hat	yahoo	2024-08-31	AU
6	Thailands battle against invasive alien blackchin tilapia	yahoo	2024-09-01	MY
7	Fukushima fishermen not in the clear yet	japan times	2024-09-02	JP
8	Wexford man goes fishing for a cause close to his heart	independent	2024-09-01	IE
9	There are many fewer fish than previously believed	yourweather	2024-08-28	UK
10	Maldives drops plan to reopen longline tuna fishing following protests	mongabay	2024-09-05	MV
11	Divers catch record 31,773 venomous fish in tournament off Florida coast	the news tribune	2024-09-16	US
12	Advanced biomass camera proves a success for New Zealand salmon farms	the fish site	2024-09-16	NZ
13	The company blurring the lines between salmonid farming and conservation	the fish site	2024-09-11	AZ
14	230 anglers caught illegally fishing in marine reserves around New Zealand	NZ Herald	2024-09-06	NZ
15	See inside KC labs where fish regrow their hearts	kansas city	2024-09-03	US
16	Why are there so many dead fish in Baltimores Inner Harbor?	the baltimore banner	2024-09-04	US
17	Fish shot with bow escapes — but angler returns next day and breaks Missouri record	kansascity	2024-09-04	US
18	NOAA proposes expanding electronic reporting of fish catches	eenews	2024-09-05	US
19	Westlake great-grandmother reels in trophy fish off Canada coast	theacorn	2024-09-06	CA
20	Tributes flood in for ginormous orange carp nicknamed the Carrot after her death aged 20	dailymail	2024-09-05	UK
21	Huge fish throws itself into a boat slapping three terrified children across the face	dailymail	2024-09-06	UK
22	Kobudai Known For Large Size, Distinctive Faces	yomiuri	2024-09-07	JP
23	Smallmouth bass excursion on south shore of Lake of the Woods	echopress	2024-09-13	US
24	Old School for Old Fish	echopress	2024-09-13	US
25	Thief River Falls meeting highlights elk management views in northwest Minnesota	echopress	2024-09-13	US