Tireless underwater robot is half fish, half jet plane

Flora Graham, deputy editor, newscientist.com

(Image: G. L. Kohuth/Michigan State University)

This robot fish doesn't get into a flap when it's time to go for a swim. Instead, it glides to conserve energy, allowing it to gather water-quality data almost indefinitely.

When it's time for the fish to make more active manoeuvres, it can swim by flapping its tail - but that would drain its battery in a few hours. Most of the time, it uses a combination of pumping water out of its body and rhythmically moving its battery to control its direction.

Grace, as the fish has been named, was designed and built by Xiaobo Tan of Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Grace was taken for a test-drive in Michigan's Kalamazoo River, where it detected crude oil from a spill in 2010. That made it the first robotic fish to demonstrate sampling with commercial water-quality sensors in a real-world environment, says Tan.

There are already underwater gliders taking the pulse of our oceans, but this robofish is about a tenth their size and weight, as well as having an energetic swimming mode that they lack.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/27966dfd/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A130C0A10Crobot0Efish0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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