A School of Robotic Fish for Pollution Detection in Port

Natural selection has made fish beautiful swimmers with high efficiency and perfect maneuvring abilities. No man-made aquatic systems are currently able to match such performance. To build a robot to realise fish-like propulsion and maneuvring abilities requires a full understanding of fish muscle structure, hydrodynamics and how to mimic. This chapter overviews the robotic fish research at Essex which is focused on the biologically inspired design of autonomous robotic fish as well as their applications to pollution detection in port. Our efforts and experience in building a number of generations or robotic fish to navigate in a three-dimensional unstructured environment are described, including the successful launch of an EU FP7 project SHOAL since March 2009. Finally, a brief summary and future research directions are outline.