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I am working on developing a new electronics platform for this robotic fish for the Michigan State University Dynamic Systems Laboratory.  The rest of the system was developed by a graduate student at Michigan State University that has since graduated.  The robotic fish is being used as a test platform to prove that a dynamically unstable fluttering tail propulstion system is more efficient than simply using a water jet.

 

The electronics system uses an ATMEGA328p with the Arduino bootloader to receive commands from a controller and react to those commands.  The microcontroller interprets the commands and uses them to generate new commands to send to the motor controller to run the pump at a certain speed.  The microcontroller also takes measurements from an accelerometer and writes the data to an on-board micro-SD card.  The data that is recorded will then be integrated to determine the maximum velocity attained by the fish with different types of tails, including a solid tail, a flexible flat latex tail, and eventually an optimally designed tail.

ROBOTIC FISH. FLUTTERING TAIL PROPULSION.

 

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