In 1961, Tom Rogers of the Leo Burnett Agency created tuna charliea joke-talking cartoon fish that was the brand’s mascot StarKist. The popular advertising campaign lasted several decadesand his catchphrase “I’m sorry Charlie” quickly hooked into the American lexicon.
When the CIA’s Office of Advanced Technologies and Programs started doing some fish-focused research in the 1990s, Charlie must have seemed like the perfect code name. Except that the “Charlie from the CIA“It was a catfish… and besides, it was a robot.
More concretely, Charlie was an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) designed to surreptitiously collect water samples. Its pilot controlled the fish through a radio in the line of sight. Not much has been revealed about the construction of the fish, other than that her body contained a pressurized hull, ballast system, and communications system, while It’s tail housed the drive.
To explore aquatic environments, nothing better than an underwater robot
The CIA wasn’t the only one to use UUVs, or even the first agency to do so.. In the United States, this type of research began in earnest in the 1950swith funding from the United States Navy for the technology for deep sea rescue and salvage operations. Other projects studied marine drones for surveillance and scientific data collection.
Aaron Marburgan electrical and computer engineer who works on UUVs at the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory, points out that the world’s oceans are largely off-limits to ships with crews.
“The nature of the oceans is that we can only go there with robots”
“To explore those unexplored regions, we are required to solve the technical problems and make the robots work”
Aaron Marburg
One of the first UUVs stands in the corridor of the Marburg office: the Self-Propelled Underwater Research Vehicle, or SPURVdeveloped in the Applied Physics Laboratory in the late 1950s. The original purpose of SPURV was to collect data on the physical properties of the sea, in particular temperature and speed of sound.
Unlike Charlie, with his fish form, SPURV had a utility torpedo shape more in keeping with its mission. At just over 3 meters in length, it could dive to 3,600 meters, had a top speed of 2.5 m/s, and ran for 5.5 hours on one battery pack. Data were recorded on magnetic tape and later transferred to a photosensitive paper strip recorder or other computer compatible medium and then plotted with a IBM 1130.
As time passed, SPURV’s instrumentation became more capable and the scope of the project expanded. In one study, for example, SPURV carried a fluorimeter to measure the dispersion of the dye in water, in support of the wake studies. The project was so successful that more SPURVs were developed, completing almost 400 missions when it ended in 1979..
Work with underwater robots, says Marburg, means balancing technical risks and mission objectives with constraints on funding and other resources. Support for purely speculative research in this area is low. The goal, then, is to build UUVs that are simple, efficient and reliable.
“Nobody wants to write a report to their funders saying, ‘Sorry, the batteries died and we lost our million-dollar robot fish in a current.'”
Aaron Marburg
A robot fish named SoFi
Since the SPURV, many other unmanned underwater vehicles, of various shapes and sizes and for various missions, in the United States and other countries. UUVs and their autonomous cousins, AUVs, are now used routinely for scientific research, education and surveillance.
At least some of these robots have been inspired by fish. In the middle of The 1990sFor example, MIT engineers worked on a RoboTuna, also nicknamed Charlie. Based on a bluefin tuna model, it had a propulsion system that mimicked the caudal fin of a real fish. This was a big change from the screws or propellers used on UUVs like the SPURV. But this Charlie never swam on his own, but was always tied to a bank of instruments.
The following work of the MIT group, a RoboPike named Wanda, he overcame this limitation and swam freely, but never learned to avoid colliding with the sides of his tank.
in 25 yearsa team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has presented to SoFia much more “piscivorous” robot, designed to swim alongside real fish without disturbing them. controlled by a console Super nintendo adapted, SoFi can dive more than 15 meters, control its own buoyancy and swim for up to 40 minutes between battery charges.
SoFi, Wanda and the 2 Charlies are examples of biomimicrya term coined in 1974 to describe the study of biological mechanisms, processes, structures, and substances. Biomimicry draws on nature to inspire design.
Sometimes the resulting technology is more effective than its natural counterpart (debatable at least), as found by Richard James Clapham while researching robotic fish for his doctorate at the University of Essex, England. Under the supervision of , expert Huosheng Hu, Clapham studied the swimming motion of Cyprinus carpio, the common carp.
He then developed 4 robots that incorporated carp swimming, the most capable of all being the iSplash II. When tested under ideal conditions (i.e. in a 5 meter long, 2 meter wide, and 1.5 meter deep tank) iSpash-II achieved a top speed of 11.6 body lengths per second (or about 3.7 m/s). That’s faster than a real carp, which has an average top speed of 10 bodies per second. But the iSplash-II fell short of the peak performance of a fish darting quickly to avoid a predator.
Of course, it is one thing to swim in a test pool or a placid lake, and another survive the harshness of a crashing wave. The latter is something that the roboticist Kathryn Daltorio has explored in depth.
Daltorio, an adjunct professor at Case Western Reserve University and co-director of the Center for Biologically Inspired Robotics Research, has studied the movements of cockroaches, earthworms, and crabs looking for clues to build better robots.
After watching a crab navigate from the sandy beach to the shallows without being thrown off course by a wave, was inspired to create an amphibious robot with conical, curved legs that could be stuck in the sand. This design allowed his robot to withstand forces up to 138% of your body weight.
In his designs, Daltorio follows the famous maxim of the architect Louis Sullivan: form follows function. It’s not trying to imitate the aesthetics of nature (his robot only looks like a crab in passing), but the best functionality. He watches how animals interact with their environment and “steals” the best ideas from animal adaptive evolution.
However, Daltorio admits there’s a place for realistic-looking robotic fish, too, because they can capture the imagination and arouse interest in roboticsas well as by nature. And unlike a hyper realistic humanoidit is unlikely that a robotic fish will fall into the spooky valley of the unusual.
Ryomei Engineering, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has developed several robots: a robotic coelacanth, a robotic golden koi, and a robotic carp. The Coelacanth was designed as an educational tool for aquariums, to present a lifelike specimen of a rarely seen fish often only known from its fossil record.
For their part, engineers from Kitakyushu University (Japan) created the tai-robot-kun, a believable looking bream. And a team at Berlin-based Evologics came up with the BOSS manta ray.
Whatever its official purpose, these nature-inspired robocreatures can inspire us in turn. UUVs that open up wonderful new vistas in the world’s oceans can expand humanity’s exploration capacity.
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