Design of 3D swim patterns for autonomous robotic fish

To realise fish-like swim patterns by a robotic system poses tremendous challenges. This requires fully understanding of fish biomechanics and the way to mimic it. This paper presents our research toward the sensor-based control of autonomous robotic fish that can swim in a 3D unstructured environment, based on observations of fish swim behaviours. Our robotic fish has a fail with three or four degrees of freedom (DOF) and is controlled by 4 onboard computers (a powerful Gumstix Linux PC and 3 PICs) and over 10 embedded sensors. Both simulated and the real fish experiments are conducted to show the feasibility and performance of the proposed approach.