A robotic fish can move its body with almost the same quickness and precision as live animal.
The robot is the "first self-contained autonomous soft robot capable of rapid body motion," a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) news release reported. A soft robot is one that is powered by fluid flowing through flexible channels.
"We're excited about soft robots for a variety of reasons," Daniela Rus, a professor of computer science and engineering, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and one of the researchers who worked on the project, said in the news release. "As robots penetrate the physical world and start interacting with people more and more, it's much easier to make robots safe if their bodies are so wonderfully soft that there's no danger if they whack you."
"With soft machines, the whole robotic planning problem changes." Rus said.
In robotic planning avoiding collisions is usually one of the key considerations, this causes scientists to be forced to make compromises in the movement of the device.
"In some cases, it is actually advantageous for these robots to bump into the environment, because they can use these points of contact as means of getting to the destination faster," Rus said.
The robots' body configuration allows it to constantly deform its body. It is fueled by a carbon dioxide canister. The robotic fish can perform up to 30 escape maneuvers before this canister runs out while simply swimming back and forth drains it more quickly.
"The fish was designed to explore performance capabilities, not long-term operation. Next steps for future research are taking that system and building something that's compromised on performance a little bit but increases longevity," Andrew Marchese, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and lead author on the paper, said in the news release.
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