In recent news MIT announced they had created a brand new type of robot. The Soft Robotic Fish, aka SoFi, is a hypnotic machine that has the potential to be a powerful tool for scientists to study ocean life.
It has been described to be similar to a miniaturized Moby Dick. According to research its flexible tail that flicks back and forth is not made of muscle and scales, but elastomer.
Apparently scientists designed SoFi to tackle many of the problems that other oceanic robotics have yet to solve. Firstly it has been designed to facilitate communication. It's usually quite common that underwater vehicles are tethered to a boat. This is because radio waves are not an effective means of communication in water. This is where SoFi’s inventors decided to do things differently and instead opted for instead is sound.
“Radio frequency communication underwater just works for a few centimeters,” says MIT CSAIL roboticist Robert Katzschmann, lead author of the paper. “Acoustic signals in water can travel for much longer and with much less energy consumption.” Using sound, divers can pilot the robot fish from almost 70 feet away.
The second problem this project had to overcome was the issue of classical robot electric motors, known as actuators being clunky with movements that can only be described as stuttery.
SoFi belongs to a burgeoning class of “soft robots,” which are, well, generally soft, and use air or oil to locomote.
What impresses me so much is how natural and realistic the robotic fish's movements are. It is amazing how scientists have been able to imitate nature so closely and the benefits that can come from applications such as these.
Take a look at the video below to see what I'm talking about:
So what do you guys think about SoFi? How do you think scientists will use this new type of technology to fix humanity's problems? Please leave your thoughts and comments below!
Thanks for reading @techblogger.
Source:
MIT Unleashes a Hypnotic Robot Fish to Help Save the Oceans - Wired
Image Source:
Fortune
Thank u for sharing!
Good post !
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@cryptoinvestinfo
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This is really cool. I wonder why the control distance is limited at 70 feet. I wouldn't think attenuation would be the issue unless the were using very high frequencies (like over 100 kHz). I guess maybe it could be the lag, even with a speed of sound in sea water of around 5000 ft/s, it would still take the signal around 14 milliseconds to go from the controller to the SoFi. A human probably wouldn't notice that, but maybe the sensor signals coming back have problems with it. I'll definitely have to read more about it.
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So just an update now that I've looked it up, unsurprisingly it turns out that using sound waves for underwater remote control is rather complicated. There are several other effects that hinder communication and signal processing, including multi-path propagation and Doppler shift. If you want to read more, check out Wikipedia's article on underwater acoustic communication.
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Excellent news you gave by your blog post @techblogger! It´s a real advance in technology to have The Soft Robotic Fish, aka SoFi working. Biologists for example will make new deep researches in the ocean. Best regards from @presentnworldsc
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I wonder if the audio that it communicates with will cause a reaction from marine life within range?
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WONDERFUL NEWS. does this in any way suggest that a whole new array of underwater robots will be invented to facilitate deep sea researches, and also provide accurate scientific data for explorations?
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