Sensory feedback of a fish robot with tunable elastic tail fin

Abstract

Many designs that evolved in fish actuation have inspired technical solutions for propulsion and maneuvering in underwater robotics. However, the rich behavioral repertoire and the high adaptivity to a constantly changing environment are still hard targets to reach for artificial systems. In this work, we truly follow the bottom up approach of building intelligent systems capable of exploring their behavioral possibilities when interacting with the environment. The free swimming fish robot Wanda2.0 has just one degree of freedom for actuation, a tail fin with varying elasticity, and various on board sensors. In the data analysis we isolate the minimal set of sensory feedback to distinguish between different swimming patterns and elasticity of the tail fin. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.