The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has unveiled a robot fish that it claims can change direction almost as fast as the real thing.
The fish – or “autonomous soft robot” as it’s described by MIT – can perform escape manoeuvres through rapid convulsions of its body, powered by carbon dioxide released from a canister in its abdomen.
Graduate student Andrew Marchese built the fish using 3D printing technology to create a mould, which was then used to cast the fish’s body from silicone rubber. The fish can execute between 20 or 30 manoeuvres before running out of gas.
“The fish was designed to explore performance capabilities, not long-term operation,” said Marchese in MIT’s announcement of the research. “Next steps for future research are taking that system and building something that’s compromised on performance a little bit but increases longevity.”
That will involve switching carbon dioxide for a pumped-water system that could keep the fish swimming for around 30 minutes of a time. Such a device could eventually be used to swim alongside schools of real fish to study their behaviour in the wild.
The project is part of MIT’s wider research into the emerging area of “soft robotics”, which Daniela Rus, MIT’s professor of computer science and engineering and director of its computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory sees as a key field for further study.
“As robots penetrate the physical world and start interacting with people more and more, it’s much easier to make robots safe if their bodies are so wonderfully soft that there’s no danger if they whack you,” she said.
“In some cases, it is actually advantageous for these robots to bump into the environment, because they can use these points of contact as means of getting to the destination faster.”
The research follows a previous MIT project unveiled in 2012 in collaboration with Harvard University and Seoul National University, which created an earthworm-like soft autonomous robot capable of crawling across surfaces by contracting its body, and able to survive being stepped on or hit with a hammer.
Such durability is one of the key motivations behind the study of soft robotics, as is the hope that the lessons from such projects may provide insight into the real animals that they are based on.
“If you build an artificial creature with a particular bio-inspired behavior, perhaps the solution for the engineered behavior could serve as a hypothesis for understanding whether nature might do it in the same way,” said Rus.