RoboFish are old news (and so are RoboTurtles, for that matter), but the Nonlinear Dynamics and Control Lab at the University of Washington has taken it upon themselves to give their robotic fish some schooling in schooling. Their fish are able to communicate with each other underwater using low power, low frequency sonar. It’s not a very high bandwidth way of exchanging information, topping out at about 80 bytes (32 or so numbers) per second. And even at that, half the information doesn’t make it most of the time. But that’s the great thing about schooling behavior: you don’t really have to know what’s going on.
Researchers found that in schools of real fish, most of them are just following whichever fish around them happen to act decisively. If only a third of a group of fish know where they’re going, it’s effectively the same as if the whole group knows. It’s this sort of really simple yet robust behavior that groups of the UW fishbots are trying to emulate, since it makes reliable communication far less necessary. Their first task (coming up this summer) is going to be to autonomously track a remote control shark, since that’s exactly what real fish like to do. If they can get that figured out, schools of autonomous robotic fish could be used to track real sharks, or maybe slightly less dangerous things, like whales. Or nudibranchs. Or humuhumunukunukuapua’a, because a fish with a name like that just has to be worth following. Probably gets into all kinds of shenanigans.
[ UW ]
http://www.botjunkie.com/2008/06/06/uw-robofish-go-to-school/