Something's
Fishy about this Robot
August 2000 issue
of Smithsonian
When it comes to speed and
maneuverability, fish leave man-made submersibles
floundering, but RoboTuna and friends may change all
that
In
a long and narrow basement room at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, RoboTuna has been taught to
swim. RoboTuna is a "biomimetic" (imitating
nature) Atlantic bluefin tuna that was conceived in the
laboratory of Michael Triantafyllou, a professor of
ocean engineering there. Why, he and his collaborators
wondered, had no useful technologies ever been developed
from studies of how fish swim? There was a definite need
to improve upon the design of autonomous underwater
vehicles. Could the propulsion system used by fish be
applied to submarines or even surface ships? First they
had to find out what made fish such efficient swimmers.
David Barrett, then a Ph.D. candidate
at MIT, designed and built RoboTuna I using what he
called "reverse engineering," finding out how
Mother Nature, through thousands of years of genetic
changes, taught fish to swim. Once RoboTuna was swimming
well, Triantafyllou and his group began to analyze the
play of water around the fish. The secret to efficient
swimming, they found, was vorticity control. Fish propel
themselves by manipulating the eddies they encounter in
the water and those they create themselves by swishing
their tails.
Several descendants of RoboTuna have
been spawned, including RoboPike and a free-swimming
robotic tuna developed at Draper Laboratory by Jamie
Anderson, called VCUUV (for Vorticity Control Unmanned
Undersea Vehicle). It is hoped that one day autonomous
vehicles can use the efficient mechanics of fish
propulsion for scientific research at sea.
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