Robotic fish swims ‘like the real thing’
- Andrew Marchese, graduate student of Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a robotic fish with a soft body made of silicone rubber, which can swim and navigate like a real fish. He created a mould using 3D printing technology and used that to cast the fish’s body.
- With the help of a canister lodged in its abdomen that releases carbon di oxide, and its soft body, the ‘fish’ can produce rapid convulsions that help it to execute 20 to 30 escape manoeuvres in each run.
- Although it was designed to explore performance capabilities, research is now focussed on improving its longevity to around 30 minutes by replacing carbon di oxide with a pumped-water system. This will enable it to swim alongside schools of real fishes, offering deeper insights to their behaviour in the wild.
- In 2012, MIT in collaboration with Harvard and Seoul universities had developed a soft earthworm-like autonomous robot which could crawl across surfaces by contracting its body, and was strong enough to survive a hit from a hammer or being stamped on.
- All these researches fall under the domain of soft robotics, an emerging field of science with its focus on strength and durability, and applications in the field of behavioural study of animals.
- Daniela Rus, MIT’s professor of computer science and engineering believes that this will help make a robot’s body safer as there is little danger on being accidentally hit by a robot. In fact, these collisions with the physical world can be used as points of contact that can help these robots reach their destinations faster.
- She believes that when building artificial robots with a particular bio-inspired behaviour, the solutions for their engineered behaviour can serve as a hypothesis for understanding whether nature might do it the same way.
- Soft Robotics
- Robotic Fish
- 3D Printing