“A team led by Hilary Bart-Smith, a professor in UVA Engineering’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, did it by attaching a bent shaft to the motor,” Lauder said. “So it’s extremely simple, and it turned out to be very effective and very power-efficient. The whole thing only costs about $100.”
And with tests performed in Lauder’s lab, the UVA team was able to show the robot’s performance and power consumption are similar to that of live fish.
In fact, Lauder said, Tunabot was so energy-efficient that, with only the power supplied by an iPhone battery, it could swim as far as about 5½ miles. The same robot, though, was also capable of very quick motion, flapping its tail as many as 15 times per second.
“You can think of it like miles per gallon, essentially,” Lauder said. “We want something that’s fish-like in performance so we can understand how the tail of a tuna fish works, so we can visualize the flow over the tail, and that’s hard to do in a live tuna.”
That’s not to say the team didn’t compare Tunabot to its biological cousins.
“We compared this quantitatively to data from live yellowfin tuna,” Lauder explained. “There is a group in Rhode Island that is raising yellowfin tuna, and we were able to go there and compare the robot with 2-meter-long tuna. That’s unusual, for a robotics paper to have quality biological data for precise comparisons.”
Ultimately, Lauder said, the hope is that the Tunabot will help shed light on the biomechanics of how open-ocean fish swim.“That’s always been one of the goals of the project,” he said. “There are a number of fish robots that have been designed for a variety of purposes, but … it’s been hard to develop robots that in any way approach the performance of open-ocean fish. The idea of exploring this high-speed performance space, that had not been done before, and that’s our major contribution.”
This research was supported with funding from the Office of Naval Research and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
The Daily Gazette
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