If you’re a huge fan of the James Bond movies but always thought they’d be a lot cooler if Bond was a robot fish that mostly swam, then this team of researchers created your dream!
Scientists at EPFL’s Robotic Systems Laboratory (LSRO), which is headed by Professor Francesco Mondada, have developed a miniature robot that can integrate perfectly into schools of zebrafish. Their work was carried out as part of an EU research program among six partner institutions,* and the findings were recently published in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.
“We created a kind of ‘secret agent’ that can infiltrate these schools of small fish,” says Frank Bonnet with a smile. Bonnet is a post-doc researcher at the LSRO and one of the study’s authors. The robot is seven centimeters long – longer than the fish it’s modeled after but with the same shape and proportions. It is equipped with magnets that link it to a tiny engine installed under the aquarium to propel it through the water. The researchers chose zebrafish, or Danio rerio, for their study because it’s a robust species whose schools tend to switch direction and move about very quickly.
There are two aspects to the research program. The first deals with biology, studying the social interactions between individual fish. Here the robot helps scientists generate targeted stimuli and test the fish’s response. The second aspect deals with robotics, and this is where the EPFL researchers focused their work.
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