Robot fish given new sense of direction

In an article published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, FILOSE project (FIsh LOcomotion and SEnsing) team members describe a robotic fish that is controlled with the help of lateral line sensors.

During the last four years, the FILOSE collaboration has investigated fish lateral line sensing and locomotion with the aims of understanding how fish detect and exploit flow features, and of developing efficient underwater robots based on biological principles.

Though flow is a highly volatile and unsteady state of matter, it can nonetheless be measured and characterized based on features that do not change much in space and time, such as flow direction or turbulence intensity.

These salient features can then be described as a ‘flowscape’ - a flow landscape that helps fish and robots to orient themselves, navigate and control their movements.

‘So far flow in robotics is treated as a disturbance that drives the robots away from their planned course’, said Prof Maarja Kruusmaa, the Scientific Coordinator of the FILOSE project. ‘We have shown that flow is also a source of information that can be exploited to better control the vehicle. Also, flow can be a source of energy if we can understand the flow dynamics and interact with eddies and currents in a clever way’.