This paper presents a novel dynamic model of a bio-inspired robotic fish underwater vehicle by unifying conventional rigid body dynamics and bio-fluid-dynamics of a carangiform fish swimming given by Lighthill’s (LH) slender body theory. It proposes an inclusive mathematical design for better control and energy efficient path travel for the robotic fish. The system is modeled as an 2-link robot...

In this paper we present a dynamic model for a tail-actuated robotic fish by merging rigid-body dynamics with Lighthill’s large-amplitude elongated-body theory. The model is validated with extensive experiments conducted on a robotic fish prototype. We investigate the role of incorporating the body motion in evaluating the tail-generated hydrodynamic force, and show that ignoring the body motio...

Biomimetic robotic fish is a new type of underwater robot with many superior characteristics such as high movement speed, high motion efficiency, high energy efficiency, and so on. However, the traditional kinematic model for biomimetic robotic fish has many shortcomings which limit their movement speed, such as the rigid shakes of the fish’s head when it swims, which is caused by neglecting th...

This paper presents the estimation of depth in an indoor, structured environment based on a stereo setup consisting of two fish-eye lenses, with parallel optical axes, mounted on a robot platform. The use of fish-eye lenses provides for a large field of view to estimate better the depth of features very close to the lens. To extract significant information from the fish-eye lens images, we firs...

trajectories generally used to describe the space and time required to perform a desired motion task for a mobile robot or manipulator system. in this paper, we considered a cubic polynomial trajectory for the problem of moving a mobile robot from its initial position to a goal position in over a continuous set of time. along the path, the robot requires to observe a certain acceleration profil...

This paper focuses on parameter identification of a target tracker robot possessing flexible joints using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Since, belt and pulley mechanisms are known as flexible joints in robotic systems, their elastic behavior affecting a tracker robot is investigated in this work. First, dynamic equations governing the robot behavior are extracted taking into acco...

We design and test an octopus-inspired flexible hull robot that demonstrates outstanding fast-starting performance. The robot is hyper-inflated with water, and then rapidly deflates to expel the fluid so as to power the escape maneuver. Using this robot we verify for the first time in laboratory testing that rapid size-change can substantially reduce separation in bluff bodies traveling several...

In this work, we explore the feasibility of regulating the collective behavior of zebrafish with a free-swimming robotic fish. The visual cues elicited by the robot are inspired by salient features of attraction in zebrafish and include enhanced coloration, aspect ratio of a fertile female, and carangiform/subcarangiform locomotion. The robot is autonomously controlled with an online multi-targ...