Tracking Fish Movement with a School of Gliding Robotic Fish

The goal of this project is to create an integrative framework for the design of coupled biological and robotic systems that accommodates system uncertainties and competing objectives in a rigorous, holistic, and e­ffective manner. The design principles are developed using a concrete, end-to-end application of tracking and modeling fish movement with a network of gliding robotic fish. The proposed robotic platform is an energy-efficient underwater gliding robotic fish that travels by changing its buoyancy and mass distribution (gliding) or by flapping tail fin (swimming). Extensive field testing was carried out in Higgins Lake, MI, in June 2018, to characterize both the navigation and tag-detection performance of gliding robotic fish. Specifically, the influence of robot depth, pitch angle, and orientation with respect to the acoustic tag was investigated. Furthermore, built on the distributed localization algorithm using time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurements, we developed a motion coordination algorithm for the robotic group, to balance the tradeoff between target tracking performance and locomotion distance (and thus energy consumption). Future work includes completing the fabrication of upgraded gliding robotic fish (GRACE 3.0) and running full experiments on tracking live fish with a school of GRACE 3.0.