Towards an Esox lucius inspired multimodal robotic fish

In this paper, we further explore multimodal locomotion via an updated robotic fish model based on Esox lucius. Besides the improved actuation properties like higher torque servomotors and powerful electronics,the robotic fish has some innovative mechanical design to pursue diverse swimming modes and superior performance. Specifically, we introduced a ±50° yawing head joint that functions as the neck for enhancing turning ability. A pair of pectoral mechanisms with two DOFs per fin is constructed to achieve 3-D swimming and to enrich multiple pectoral motions. At the control level, an improved central pattern generator(CPG) model allowing for free adjustment of the phase relationship among outputs is employed to produce rhythmic signals of multimodal swimming. Extensive experiments were carried out to examine how characteristic parameters in CPGs including amplitude, frequency, and phase lag affect the swimming performance. As a result, the robotic fish successfully performed various locomotion actions such as forward swimming, backward swimming, turning, diving, surfacing, as well as three pectoral motions in the form of pitching, heaving, and heaving-pitching.We found that small phase lag between oscillating joints which means large propulsive body wave length and undulation width could lead to a faster swimming in body and/or caudal fin(BCF) locomotion.     

3-D Locomotion control for a biomimetic robot fish

This paper concerns with 3-D locomotion control methods for a biomimetic robot fish. The system architecture of the fish is firstly presented based on a physical model of carangiform fish. The robot fish has a flexible body, a rigid caudal fin and a pair of pectoral tins, driven by several servomotors. The motion control of the robot fish are then divided into speed control, orientation control, submerge control and transient motion control, corresponding algorithms are detailed respectively. Finally, experiments and analyses on a 4-link, radio-controlled robot fish prototype with 3-D locomotion show its good performance.     

Precise planar motion measurement of a swimming multi-joint robotic fish一种面向多关节机器鱼平面运动的精确测量方法

This paper presents a method for planar motion measurement of a swimming multi-joint robotic fish. The motion of the robotic fish is captured via image sequences and a proposed tracking scheme is employed to continuously detect and track the robotic fish. The tracking scheme initially acquires a rough scope of the robotic fish and thereafter precisely locates it. Historical motion information is utilized to determine the rough scope, which can speed up the tracking process and avoid possible ambient interference. A combination of adaptive bilateral filtering and k-means clustering is then applied to segment out color markers accurately. The pose of the robotic fish is calculated in accordance with the centers of these markers. Further, we address the problem of time synchronization between the on-board motion control system of the robotic fish and the motion measurement system. To the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been tackled in previous research on robotic fish. With information about both the multi-link structure and motion law of the robotic fish, we convert the problem to a nonlinear optimization problem, which we then solve using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Further, smoothing splines are adopted to fit curves of poses versus time, in order to obtain a continuous motion state and alleviate the impact of noise. Velocity is acquired via a temporal derivative operation. The results of experiments conducted verify the efficacy of the proposed method.