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ROBOT FISH


The Robot Fish
Since this project is currently being developed for the Navy as research, even though it's not confidential, I have decided to limit what I share on the project to only what has been currently published.

Download all of our robot fish papers by all of our team members (30mb).

or . . .

The first paper describes the design and optimization of the pectoral fin of our robotic fish.

• John Palmisano, Ravi Ramamurti, Kerr-Jia Lu, Jonah Cohen, William Sandberg, Banahalli Ratna, Design of a Biomimetic Controlled-Curvature Robotic Pectoral Fin, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Rome, Italy, 2007.
  Best Conference Paper Award
  Invited to publish in IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) in progress

The second paper proposes an AUV, and it's control system, employing two of our robot pectoral fins.

• Jason Geder, John Palmisano, Ravi Ramamurti, William Sandberg, Banahalli Ratna, A New Hybrid Approach to Dynamic Modeling and Control Design for a Pectoral Fin Propelled UUV, 15th International Symposium on Unmanned Untethered Submersible Technology, Durham, New Hampshire, USA on August 19th-22nd, 2007.

The third paper was published as a chapter in a book. It describes the current state of the project, as well as goes into UUV design, UUV control, and CFD simulations of the UUV.

• John Palmisano, Jason Geder, Ravi Ramamurti, Kerr-Jia Liu, Jonah Cohen, Tewodros Mengesha, Jawad Naciri, William Sandberg, Banahalli Ratna, Book Chapter: Design, Development, and Testing of Flapping Fins with Actively Controlled Curvature for an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle, Bio-mechanisms of Swimming and Flying, Springer Japan, pp. 283-294, 2008.

The fourth paper goes into details on UUV control, using simulation for validation.

• Jason Geder, John Palmisano, Ravi Ramamurti, William Sandberg, Banahalli Ratna, Fuzzy Logic PID Based Control Design and Performance for a Pectoral Fin Propelled Unmanned Underwater Vehicle, International Conference on Control, Automation and Systems, Seoul, Korea, on Oct. 14-17, 2008.

This following paper models the robot fish in CFD to determine drag coefficients and the effects of the fish body on the fins.

• Ravi Ramamurti, Jason Geder, John S. Palmisano, Banahalli Ratna, William Sandberg, "Computations of Flapping Fin Propulsion for UUV Design," 47th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Conference, AIAA-2009-0724, Washington, DC, January 2009.

This paper shows how the CFD computed drag coefficients are used in a UUV controls simulation. It also shows the prototype experimental fish (actual pics) doing various preliminary maneuvers.

• Jason Geder, Ravi Ramamurti, John S. Palmisano, Marius Pruessner, Banahalli Ratna, William Sandberg, "Sensor Data Fusion and Submerged Test Results of a Pectoral Fin Propelled UUV," International Symposium on Unmanned Untethered Submersible Technology, Durham, New Hampshire, USA on August 23rd-26th, 2009.

Three papers are in the pipeline and will be published by December 2008: one on an innovative pectoral fin CPG, one explaining our novel computational design approach, and one on using control to optimize pectoral fin efficiency. I'll post those here when they are published by journals/conferences.

I promise to post video on the project after it is finished.

In the meantime, feel free to check out a few of my CFD images of the robot fish on my finite element analysis tutorial. You can also read more about my robot fish on the robot forum.