technically his name is gilbert with two
l's
yeah right now it doesn't even have the
googly eyes on it so
that's why it's not working i think
that's probably it
i'm stephen howe i'm a fourth year phd
student in the biomimicry program
and i study fish biomechanics so
i'm interested in how they move
and how their body movements relate to
their
total body so this is our um fish robot
it's a robotic platform that we use to
answer questions about fish locomotion
that we can't with live fish because
robots do what you want whereas the
animal doesn't always do what you ask it
to
and so um
the robot actually provides us an
interesting set of um
circumstances we can change the shape of
the robot independent of the motions
that the body makes
so if i'm studying eels and tuna
i can't tell the eel would you mind
something like a tuna for me and vice
versa whereas with a robot we can make
this shaped like a tuna and say robot
please swim like an eel so there's a
skeleton inside that you can then have
algorithms yeah the robot is pretty
simple it's five servo motors connected
to an arduino and then we use the
arduino program to
run the robot and the program that we've
written allows us to program
straight swimming but also interject
turns whenever we want
and this is based on some of my earlier
research with fish and understanding how
they control their pulses
so the tether it's slightly taking it
for a walk right
so yeah um there's no sensors or
anything in here um deciding when it
should turn it's just a pre-programmed
algorithm
and
i use the tether kind of as a leash to
reset the system
looks like we have a motor not behaving
everything on this robot save the
motors and the wires is 3d printed so
that flexible tail you see we printed in
our machine in the back and these body
shells we
copied the morphology of an actual fish
so this is based on a giant danube which
is the larger cousin of the zebrafish
that you see in the pet shop all the
time we can make this shape like
anything our
future research is going to involve
looking at
how increasing body depth
changes the maneuverability so think
about plate shaped fish like a discus or
um
like a place or a skate or well places
and skates are interesting because um
they've turned their heads to the side
and so they look like they're um
top to bottom but they do swim like a
laterally compressed fish
but um think more like uh tangs like
dory hi i'm dory where which way
i'm trying to see which mother this is
and i'll just unplug it
sounds like
yeah
no that didn't drop the amperage okay
there's a few different applications
mainly opportunities for underwater
reconnaissance it can be applied to i
mean the navy would be interested in
things like this but so would um
uh
oil rig
inspections as well as dams or bridges
most often uh the robots they're using
right now are shaped like refrigerators
and have about six squirt guns pointing
off in uh several different directions
and so you can imagine jets
yeah you've got a very
un hydrodynamic shape that's very
unstable
matched with a very complicated control
scheme and so you lose these things all
the time and they're like five million
dollars a piece so if you have a control
scheme that's more robust but is still
just as maneuverable
you can potentially
not lose things nearly as often
so
yeah yeah um but the other thing is like
just underwater exploration in general
like uh we can scuba dive and free
divers can dive down to like 500 feet
but they can only be down there for
three to forty minutes depending on the
circumstances and so because of that we
know almost nothing about what's
happening underwater ultimately it would
be good if we can
spend a whole lot more time underwater
and
drones like this are going to be
important for being able to expand our
capabilities in that realm so
just a single wave we're working on more
complex implementations and finally it
can even perform something called
concertina locomotion and so once it
gets to that point
it'll finish a cycle so this is what
they do inside of a tunnel if it hit the
tunnel wall it would be detecting that