Research Development on Fish Swimming

Fishes have learned how to achieve outstanding swimming performance through the evolution of hundreds of millions of years,which can provide bio-inspiration for robotic fish design.The premise of designing an excellent robotic fish include fully understanding of fish locomotion mechanism and grasp of the advanced control strategy in robot domain.In this paper,the research development on fish swimming is presented,aiming to offer a reference for the later research.First,the research methods including experimental methods and simulation methods are detailed.Then the current research directions including fish locomotion mechanism,structure and function research and bionic robotic fish are outlined.Fish locomotion mechanism is discussed from three views:macroscopic view to find a unified principle,microscopic view to include muscle activity and intermediate view to study the behaviors of single fish and fish school.Structure and function research is mainly concentrated from three aspects:fin research,lateral line system and body stiffness.Bionic robotic fish research focuses on actuation,materials and motion control.The paper concludes with the future trend that curvature control,machine learning and multiple robotic fish system will play a more important role in this field.Overall,the intensive and comprehensive research on fish swimming will decrease the gap between robotic fish and real fish and contribute to the broad application prospect of robotic fish.

Design and Mechanics of a Composite Wave-driven Soft Robotic Fin for Biomimetic Amphibious Robot

Bionic amphibious robots have important prospects in scientific, commercial, and military fields. Compared with traditional amphibious robots which use propellers/jets for aquatic medium and wheels/tracks for terrestrial medium, bionic propulsion method has great advantages in terms of manoeuvrability, efficiency, and reliability, because there is no need to switch between different propulsion systems. To explore the integrated driving technology of amphibious robot, a novel bio-inspired soft robotic fin for amphibious use is proposed in this paper. The bionic fin can swim underwater and walk on land by the same undulating motion. To balance the conflicting demands of flexibility underwater and rigidity on land, the undulating fin adopts a special combination of a membrane fin and a bending spring. A periodic longitudinal wave in horizontal direction has been found generating passively in dynamic analysis. To find the composite wave-driven mechanics, theoretical analysis is conducted based on the walking model and swimming model. A virtual prototype is built in ADAMS software to verify the walking mechanics. The simulation result reveals that the passive longitudinal wave is also periodical and the composite wave contributes to land walking. Finally, an amphibious robot prototype actuated by a pair of undulating fins has been developed. The experiments show that the robot can achieve multiple locomotion, including walking forward/backward, turning in place, swimming underwater, and crossing medium, thus giving evidence to the feasibility of the newly designed undulating fin for amphibious robot.

A biomimetic robot crawling bidirectionally with load inspired by rock-climbing fish

Using a unique adhesive locomotion system,the rock-climbing fish(Beaufortia kweichowensis)adheres to submerged surfaces and crawls both forwards and backwards in torrential streams.To emulate this mechanism,we present a biomimetic robot inspired by the locomotion model of the rock-climbing fish.The prototype contains two anisotropic adhesive components with linkages connected to a linear actuator.Each anisotropic adhesive component consists of one commercial sucker and two retractable bioinspired fin components.The fin components mimic the abduction and adduction of pectoral and pelvic fins through the retractable part to move up and down.The robot prototype was tested on vertical and inverted surfaces,and worked successfully.These results demonstrate that this novel system represents a new locomotion solution for surface movement without detachment from the substrate.