Robotic Fish

Development Report:

Robotic Fish
Yogo Takada, Keisuke Koyama, and Takahiro Usami
Department of Mechanical and Physical Engineering, Osaka City University
3-3-138 Sugimoto, Sumiyoshi-ku, Osaka 558-8585, Japan
E-mail: takada@mech.eng.osaka-cu.ac.jp, {yamadataro800, us.a.3.tk.uoc}@gmail.com
[Received November 13, 2013; accepted March 18, 2014]

Based on our robotic fish studies since 2003, this pa-

per introduces a FPGA offline control underwater
searcher (FOCUS) and a bream robot equipped with
advanced mechanism (BREAM). The performance of
the first FOCUS prototype, built in 2011, is now
being improved. FOCUS has 2 cameras and field-
programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) with high arith-
metic processing capabilities. The appearance of the
FOCUS is so cute. The two FOCUS types now avail- Fig. 1. FOCUS.
able are an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV)
and a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). BREAM, in
contrast, is an entertainment robot prototype designed
for Asutamuland Tokushima exhibition. BREAM has
four joints based on analytical computational fluid dy-
namics (CFD) results showing that robotic fish with
multiple joints achieve better propulsion performance
than that with single joint. Two of the four joints are
used for propulsion and two are used for turning the
prototype. RC-FOCUS is also exhibited at Asutamu-
land Tokushima, together with BREAM.
Fig. 2. FOCUS structure.
Keywords: robotics fish, underwater robot, tracking con-
trol, location estimation, remote control
tal results.
A robotic fish looks so cute that it has great entertain-
1. Introduction ment value in attracting crowds. Since 2004, we have
kept several carps in our laboratory to comprehensively
Many kinds of underwater vehicles and robots have observe their swimming behavior. Specifically, we have
been operated in the ocean but they have not been used measured water flow around the caudal fin using particle
in the narrow or shallow spaces of water such as rivers image velocimetry (PIV) and have numerically simulated
or ponds. A robot designed to research fish and aquatic water flow around natural and robotic fish using compu-
organisms, i.e., an aqua robot should be small and silent tational fluid dynamics (CFD) [3–5].
enough that it does not frighten aquatic organisms. Since BREAM, which reproduces fish behavior, is an or-
2003, we have worked to develop robotic fish smaller than namental entertainment robot exhibited at Asutamuland
any before and driven caudal-fin propulsion. Tokushima. Ornamental fish tanks usually are very wide
A robotic fish should be able to swim for long periods, but very short. BREAM, with its high turning perfor-
track target fish [1] and photograph objects through im- mance, keeps swimming without getting caught in the
age processing technology – all without frightening natu- corners of a fish tank.
ral inhabitants, e.g., fish,. It also must be able to estimate
its location to identify the location of photographed tar-
gets (fish). Since it is used in underwater areas such as
2. FOCUS
rivers, where global positioning systems (GPS) are use-
less, it could identify its location by photographing bot- Figure 1 shows FOCUS and Fig. 2 its structure. It is
tom terrain and tracking changes over time [2]. 275 mm long, weighs 517 g, and drives its caudal fin with
We first describe FOCUS, its features, its tracking ca- a magnetic actuator. The extremely small actuator keeps
pabilities, its location estimation method and experimen- FOCUS swimming for more than five hours using a sin-

Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics Vol.26 No.3, 2014 391

Takada, Y., Koyama, K., and Usami, T.

Fig. 4. Remote-controlled FOCUS.

Fig. 3. Results of tracking control and location estimation

experiments.

(a) Side view

gle 1100 mAh lithium polymer battery cell. It has two

cameras – one looking forward at the front and one at the
bottom looking down.
When the front camera detects a red object ahead, the
caudal actuator and the behavior-control device direct (b) Top view
FOCUS toward the object to track the target while keep- Fig. 5. BREAM.
ing it within the center of the image.
In FOCUS location, the camera at the bottom pho-
tographs the fish tank bottom at intervals of 33.3 ms and
the robot’s swim distance is calculated by digital image
correlation on two frame images adjoined temporally. The
robot’s location is calculated by correcting swim distance
by the yaw angle obtained from a gyrosensor.
Figure 3 shows experimental results for robot tracking
control and location estimation performed five times until
a goal was reached. Experimental results show that the
robot tracks a target appropriately and identifies its track-
ing paths based on location estimation.
Of the four FOCUS prototypes we have developed, we Fig. 6. BREAM structure.
modified prototype No.1, which had been treated valuably
by us for a long term, into a radio control (RC) FOCUS,
as shown in Fig. 4. This FOCUS was exhibited at Asuta-
muland Tokushima, which is an amusement park in Japan, the head are driven by a servomotor and the second and
to attract and please as many visitors as possible. Visitors third by a single brushless DC motor. Based on the sec-
control RC FOCUS floating and sinking, left and right ond joint’s swinging, the third joint adjusts its swinging
turns, and swimming speed. phase lag in increments of 90◦ . The first and fourth joints
are used only for turning. Using the first and fourth joints
while swimming straight increases its propulsion speed.
3. BREAM A 1200 mAh 3-cell lithium polymer battery in BREAM
runs out in about 10 minutes use. This remains one issue,
Figure 5 shows BREAM and Fig. 6 its structure. among others, to be solved to enable it swim for much
BREAM, shaped like a sea bream, is 400 mm long, longer periods.
30 mm thick, and weighs 750 g. Its turning ability is ex- Left side of Fig. 7 shows actual BREAM turning at one-
tremely high. Of its four joints, the first and fourth from second intervals. Then, the right side of Fig. 7 shows the

392 Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics Vol.26 No.3, 2014


0s 4s
1s 5s
2s 6s
3s 7s
Fig. 7. Results of turning behavior experiments.
relationships between the phase difference of the second References:
and third joints and the turning radius. Triangles () indi-
cate plastic caudal-fin results and squares (2) soft caudal-
fin results. Fig. 7 shows that soft caudal fins like those of
a fish are superior in turning ability to hard caudal fins.
If the fish tank is too small, FOCUS may get caught in
tank corners, forcing someone to manually release it by
changing its swimming directions. In contrast, BREAM
has high turning ability that keeps it from being caught
and enables it to keep swimming by simply operating a
transmitter lever.
Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics Vol.26 No.3, 2014
Robotic Fish
150
Caudal fin (hard)
Turning radius [mm]
Caudal fin (soft)
100
50
0 60 120 180 240 300 360
I [r]
[1] Y. Takada, T. Nakamura, K. Koyama, and T. Tajiri, “Target Follow-
ing Control of Small Fish Robot FOCUS Based on Color Informa-
tion,” JSME, Series C, Vol.78, No.792, pp. 2924-2934, 2012.
[2] Y. Takada, T. Nakamura, K. Koyama, and T. Wakisaka, “Self-
position Estimation of Small Fish Robot Based on Visual Informa-
tion from Camera,” J. of Japan Institution of Marine Engineering,
Vol.47, No.3, pp. 437-443, 2012.
[3] Y. Takada, Y. Nakanishi, R Araki, and T. Wakisaka, “Investigation
of Propulsive Force and Water Flow around a Small Fish Robot
by PIV Measurement and Three-dimensional Numerical Analysis,”
JSME, Series C, Vol.76, No.763, pp. 665-672, 2010.
[4] Y. Takada, T. Ochiai, N. Fukuzaki, T. Tajiri, and T. Wakisaka,
“Analysis of Flow around Robotic Fish by Three-dimensional
Fluid-structure Interaction Simulation and Evaluation of Propul-
sive Performance,” J. of Aero Aqua Bio-mechanisms, Vol.3, No.1,
pp. 57-64, 2013.
[5] Y. Takada, R. Araki, T. Ochiai, T. Tajiri, and T. Wakisaka, “Ef-
fects of Tail Fin Flexibility on Propulsive Performance in Small Fish
Robots (Investigation by Fluid-Structure Interaction Analysis Con-
sidering Elastic Deformation of Tail Fin),” JSME, Series C, Vol.77,
No.778, pp. 2351-2362, 2011.
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