2016 Al-Sadeq International Conference on Multidisciplinary in IT and Communication Science

and Applications (AIC-MITCSA) – IRAQ (9-10) May

Design and Implementation of Swimming Robot

Based on Carp Fish Biomimetic
Ammar Ibrahim Majeed
Electrical Engineering Department
University of Mustansiriyah
Baghdad, Iraq
E-mail: ammar.alkindy@uomustansiriyah.edu.iq
Abduladhem Abdulkareem Ali, SMIEEE
Computer Engineering Department
University of Basrah
Basrah, Iraq
E-mail: abduladeem1@yahoo.com

Abstract—This paper introduces a complete plan for design various swimming modes and to specify the parameters
and implementation of a biomimetic robotic fish. The robot affecting the swimming process. These modes are categorized
design is physically based on a model of a Carp fish. The as follows;
designed robot has a rigid anterior body part, flexible posterior
body part and a flexible caudal fin. The flexible posterior body A. Periodic Straight Line Swimming Mode
part is consists of four links and are driven by four servomotors In normal states, fish swim steadily in periodic mode. This
in addition to a fifth one for controlling the robot pitch angle
swimming technique is used to cover large distances at a
through changing the centre of gravity position. The designed
robot was also equipped with diving system which consists of a constant speed, may be with a low acceleration/deceleration of
water pump and an internal tank. The fish locomotion control is about 0.3L/s2, where L is the fish body length [1], see Fig. 1.
divided into speed, orientation, diving and transient motion
control. The swimming of the robotic fish was relied on the so
called behavioural based control system that makes use of a
sensor fusion algorithm. The innovative design of the robotic fish
combines the two schemes of the underwater vehicles or robots
control in that it can swim autonomously or remotely controlled Fig. 1. Periodic fish swimming in a straight line.
by a personal computer via WiFi link. The experimental results
B. Transient Turning C or S Shape Swimming Mode
of the designed robotic fish show the excellent feasibility and high
performance of the proposed design. The live fish can turns by executing few successive motions;
firstly, the fish swim steadily in a straight manner; secondly, it
Index Terms— Biomimetic, Robotic fish, 3-D locomotion, bends its body toward its centroid taking the shape of letter
Discrete control system. „C‟ for a very short time interval, then, after the head of the
fish become in the desired orientation, its posterior body part
I. INTRODUCTION
and tail restore the initial stretched straight shape; finally, fish
The fish has an efficient mechanical system with regard to cruises toward the required direction. Consequently, a
their habitation and method of living for each type due to sequence of successive movements for the robotic fish are
natural selection, although it is not always optimum. These constructed to emulate the turning procedure steps, namely,
amazing capabilities of fish push the human to develop large cruising, arcing its body, restoring straight shape, and cruising
number of underwater vehicles which are very suitable for once again, see Fig. 2.
operation in aquatic environments and they are essentially
based on the mechanical structure and propulsion method seen
in fishes. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) used for
scientific research are example of aquatic application, which
is continuously seeking for enhanced efficiency that permit
long mission to be carried out. High efficiency locomotion
capabilities seen in many types of fishes could offer
inspirations for a design of propulsion mechanisms that can
replace the propellers that are used nowadays. The benefits of
silent propulsion and an inconspicuous wake can be used
predominantly for defence applications. Studying fish Fig 2. Transient fish swimming. a) C-turn start, b) Fish path during C-turn, c)
swimming styles and extracting the dexterous swimming S-shape maneuver, (d) Fish path during S-shape maneuver.
skills of these fishes opens the doors for these features to be The fish can turn with very low angular speed of nearly 0.5
exploited in the field of robotics that is continuously growing rad/s, with fixed linear speed. There are many other
to cover every field of our life. swimming modes that can be categorized as transient, such as;
burst, brake, coast and ascent-descent swimming modes.
II. CARP FISH SWIMMING MODES These modes could be designed from the straight and turn
This section deals with the characterization and evaluation swimming modes with some modifications to the amplitude
of the movements that enables the Carp fish to swim under and/or the frequency of undulation of the robotic fish tail.
 2016 Al-Sadeq International Conference on Multidisciplinary in IT and Communication Science
and Applications (AIC-MITCSA) – IRAQ (9-10) May
The swimming speed of the robotic fish can be controlled
by modulating either the tail links undulation frequency or the
amplitude of links undulation. To enhance the manoeuvring
capability of the fish, two swimming maneuver movement
modes for obstacle and predator avoidance and escaping are
designed to imitate the transient behaviour of the live fish.
III. FORCES EXERTING ON A FISH DURING SWIMMING
The most important features of water that affects the
evolution of fishes are its high density which is 800 times
compared to that of air and its incompressibility. The density
of water is approximately equals to that of the aquatic
animals‟ bodies which is sufficiently counterbalancing the
gravitational force. This property makes it possible to develop
various swimming propulsors, because that there is no need
for fish weight supporting [2]. Figure 3 demonstrates the
terms used to investigate the fish swimming mechanisms, as
they will be used through this work.
Fig. 3. Terms used to characterize the fish fins and other fish features [2].
In swimming, momentum is transferred between fish body
and water and the chief reaction forces are drag force,
acceleration reaction force and lift force.
Drag can be split into the several categories:
 Viscous or friction drag; It is due to the friction between
the fish body and the water.
 Form drag; It is generated due to water pushing away
from the path of the fish.
 Vortex or induced drag; It is due to loss of energy through
the vortices which is produced by the caudal fin and other
fins.
The two latter components are combined together to form
the pressure drag. Acceleration reaction represents an inertial
force produced due to water resistance that is surrounding the
fish body. Lift forces are produced by the pectoral fins which
cause asymmetrical flow around them and produce lift [2].
Figure 4a shows the forces exerting on a fish during
swimming. These forces are hydrodynamic lift, buoyancy and
weight in the vertical direction, alongside with thrust and
resistance in the horizontal direction.
Fig. 4. (a) The forces exerting on a fish during swimming. (b) Roll, Yaw
and Pitch explanations [2].
Figure 4b shows the direction of movement in terms of
pitch, roll, and yaw. For a fish swimming in a constant speed,
the total thrusting force must be equivalent to the total
resistance it faces while swimming forward.
IV. CARANGIFORM ROBOTIC FISH
The study of biomimetic is largely motivated by the need to
integrate design advantages found in the natural world to
experimental devices and, eventually, practical machines. The
work contained herein consisted of the construction of a
biomimetic carangiform robotic fish that possesses a
propulsive section with four short links capable of fitting the
sinusoids of fish swimming in straight, C-turn and S-
maneuver modes shown in Fig. 2a and Fig. 2c.
Before a mechanical design for an oscillating foil propulsor
can be synthesized, first a basis for motion modelling and
control of the propulsor elements must be established to
ensure that the propulsor will be feasible to build as well as
effective. In bio-inspired fish-swimming engineering, the
undulatory part of the robotic fish is designed in a discrete
manner as a multilink (or n-link) structure composed of
numerous undulating hinges actuated by servomotors. The
model of this structure can be made by assuming that the body
is consisting of a chain of successive links along the body
centerline, and the spatial displacement of links ending points
can be estimated by a curve fitting to a discrete, positional and
time-dependent body wave. This can be accomplished by
using equation 1.
y = f (x, i) = (c1x + c2x2) sin (kx + 2πi/N) (1)
where y equals the tail‟s horizontal displacement from the
undulation center, i represents the ith value for the sequence
y(x, i), (i = 0, 1, 2, ... N-1) during one complete undulation
period, c1 and c2 are the linear and quadratic wave amplitude
envelopes, x represents the location on the tail, k is the body
wave number which equals two times pi divided by the tail
length, N represents the discretization degree of the traveling
wave. [3].
For a four links tail, the approximated tail wave was shown
in Fig. 5. This Figure shows the time-stepped tail links curve
fitting.
Fig. 5. Tail links curve approximation.
In this work, the designed robotic fish and its control would
be depends on the live Carp fish monitoring data in various
swimming modes. These data were collected during our work
on the previous paper.
 2016 Al-Sadeq International Conference on Multidisciplinary in IT and Communication Science
and Applications (AIC-MITCSA) – IRAQ (9-10) May
Fish are vertebrates with a spinal column made up of many Finally the controller interprets the servomotor state space
small bone segments, see Fig. 6. Mimicking this with an and generates a pulse width modulated (PWM) signal for each
artificial mechanism is impractical. The mechanical links are servomotor. The most common PWM signal for neutral
almost sure to be longer than the individual fish vertebrae, so position in servomotors is 1.5ms, with the sweep ranging from
the mechanical fish tail inherently lacks the flexibility of an 1.0ms to 2.0ms.
actual fish. In the construction of an artificial fish tail, the
minimizing of tail link size and the use of numerous links will
allow the artificial fish tail to better fit the sinusoidal curves of (5)
actual fish motion.

For each swimming mode, a tail oscillation frequency of 1

Fig. 6. Skeleton of a generalized bony fish [4].
Using the data collected from monitoring a live fish during
a straight line swimming to resolve the tail geometry for each
time step, a rectangular matrix STraight Undulation (ST-Und)
is created for tail link angles. This matrix would represent a
look-up table of robotic fish microcontroller.
Hz was used to ensure that the servomotors were within their
maximum operating speed with safety margin during testing,
to avoid having experimental data contaminated by
servomotors not keeping proper time. The sampling frequency
used was 20 Hz; this frequency was chosen because it yielded
a time step interval that was slightly greater than the response
time of the servomotors, therefore increasing sampling
frequency above 20 Hz would not increase state space
resolution with this hardware and would not improve fidelity.
The designed robotic fish is shown in Fig. 7. The weight of
this robot is 5 kg.

(2)

In this system n represents the order of the link pin

connection, starting numbering at zero with the connection to
the body, and N, as in equation 1, is the time step.
For each swimming mode, (straight, C-turn, and S-
maneuver), there is a special look-up table except for the
turning left or turning right swimming during a straight mode
where the servos angles are derived from that of a straight line
swimming added with a suitable deflection angle φd or -φd
applied to the first and second links angles only. Defining a
vector φ = {φ1, φ2, φ3, φ4} as the joints status, then:
φ1 = φ1T + φd/2,
φ2 = φ2T + φd/2,
φ3 = φ3T, and
φ4 = φ4T
where {φ1T , φ2T , φ3T , φ4T } is the stored data in the robotic made of aluminium, see Fig. 8.
fish microcontroller within the lock-up table.
The final operation to convert the model into a state space
for the controller is to transform the angular information into
servomotor states. This is done by scaling the angle to a
servomotor articulation that ranges from -λ degrees to +λ
degrees. The angle is divided by λ degrees, multiplied by 128,
the common neutral state of a servomotor when using
proportional control, then added to 128. Thus, for an angle of -
λ degrees the state is 0, for an angle of +λ degrees the state is
256, and for an angle of 0 degrees the state is 128.
(4) total length for the designed fish of 54.5 cm. The schematic
Fig. 7. The designed robotic fish.
Aluminium cast was used to build the rigid head and frontal
body, offering protecting cavity and waterproofing case to
gather the robotic fish components. The multi-link flexible tail
was built of four direct acting standard sized hobby
servomotors connected one to another as a chain by
aluminium links, one servomotor for each link, considering
the caudal fin (make of thin layer of cold silicon), in its final
(3) link, which produces the main part of the thrusting force. The
caudal fin was designed to mimic the shape of the Carp fish
caudal fin and it was fixed to the last link via a thin peduncle
Fig. 8. Biomimetic of the caudal fin of the Carp fish.
Each link is formed of single aluminium piece, that is has a
hull to contain the servo of that link. The lengths of the links,
starting of the link attached to the fish body and ending at the
link that attached to the caudal fin, are; 8.5, 6.5, 6, and 13.5
cm long with the anterior body length of 28.5 cm making the
diagram shown in Fig. 9 illustrates these parts of the robotic
fish.
 2016 Al-Sadeq International Conference on Multidisciplinary in IT and Communication Science
and Applications (AIC-MITCSA) – IRAQ (9-10) May
their body weight is exactly the same as the buoyancy force
acting on them. However, in practice this is difficult to
achieve due to changing water conditions. One of the methods
used to control the RoboFish depth is to use a static diving
system which is based on the pressure ballast system shown in
Fig. 10.

Fig. 9. The main parts of the four-links designed robotic fish. Fig. 10. Static diving based on pressure ballast system.
Development of the four links RoboFish with high speed
The system is working as follows; the ballast tank has an
actuation ensures turning rates that could approach those for
air at ambient pressure. When the valve is opened, the water is
actual fish that could achieve a turning rate of 105 degrees in
pumped inside the ballast tank, causing the air to be
0.9 second. The state space developed for the RoboFish,
compressed, which making the robot heavier and make it dive.
includes three distinct swimming modes; straight swimming,
As the air pressure inside the ballast tank increased, the pump
C-start, and S-maneuver in addition to several swimming
cannot pump more water into the tank, or when the pump is
behaviours, such as, turning left or right, diving-floating
turned off as the desired depth is accomplished, in this case
capability, cruising-in-straight, cruising-in-turn, sharp-turn,
the valve can be closed. To make the robot float again, the
and ascent-decent.
valve is opened to release water which is pushed out the tank
As it can be seen in Fig. 9, that the robotic fish hardware is
due to pressurized air force. The air inside the tank is then
consisting of the following components; an accelerometer
expand and making the robot positively buoyant once again.
type ADXL345, gyroscope type L3GD20, a compass type
This method is quite simple and very reliable. If the valve
LSM303DLHC, a Wi-Fi communication module type WiFi-
system was failed for any reason, the robot will float as the
Plus-click MRF24WB0MA all from MikroElektronika, a
water leaks out the tank. With a medium pressure pump, only
pressure sensor type MPX4115 for depth estimation from
70 to 80% of the ballast tank capacity can be utilized, causing
Freescale, five IR proximity sensors type GP2Y0A21YK from
in a small lost volume. For the diving purposes a mini micro
Sharp, four servo motors actuating the fish tail (two sub-micro
water pump, type RS-360SH was used with a suitable ballast
sized waterproof servos type TRA2065 from Traxxas and two
tank and valve.
standard servos type MG995 from TowerPro), one water gear
pump for diving control type RS-360SH from Estone New, a VI. STABILITY
colour wireless RF camera work in the bandwidth (900-1200
MHz), two batteries each 2200mAh and a voltage regulators, One other important aspect of anybody in an underwater
two microcontrollers type PIC18F45K22 from Microchip (one environment is the body‟s stability. For example if the body is
gathering sensors data and directing the data communication neutrally buoyant but it is not statically stable then when the
with personal computer through serial lines and Wi-Fi module body is at rest it might tilt to one side rather than stay
and the other for controlling the servo motors and the water horizontal. Stability of a submerged body is determined by the
gear pump and also gathering IR proximity sensors data). The relative positioning of the gravitational and buoyancy force
two microcontrollers were programmed using MikroC vectors. These positions are termed the center of gravity
Integrated Development Environment (IDE). A personal (COG) and center of buoyancy (COB). For the robot to
computer with a complete graphical user interface (GUI) remain at a constant depth the magnitudes of the gravitational
written in Visual Basic program was designed to control the and buoyancy forces acting through the COG and COB
robotic fish when it was in ROV mode, to display the sensors respectively must be equal. However, for the robot to be
data transmitted by the robotic fish, and display the video statically stable the COG and the COB must coincide so there
images streamed form the wireless camera attached to the is not rotational force moment produced; see Fig. 11 [5].
robotic fish. As the robot has a pressure sensor, compass, Placing the COG below the COB on the body‟s z-axis ensures
accelerometer and gyroscope, hence, depth, heading angle and the system stability.
speed of the robot are obtained easily.
V. BUOYANCY AND DEPTH CONTROL
In the water environment fish is not only control their
movements in the horizontal plane but also control the depth
at which they swim. Therefore, their bodies have to counteract
the buoyancy force generated by the water displacement of
their bodies in order to maintain depth. One way to Fig. 11. Restoring forces for roll around x-axis (a) when upright i.e. no roll
accomplish this is to become neutrally buoyant; this means angular displacement and (b) with angular roll displacement, with COB and
COG differ on z-axis.
 2016 Al-Sadeq International Conference on Multidisciplinary in IT and Communication Science
and Applications (AIC-MITCSA) – IRAQ (9-10) May
VII. COMMUNICATION WITH ROBOTIC FISH importance. In this work, the robotic fish has a 3D swimming
In order to control the robotic fish remotely and to send capability, therefore five sensors are required to detect and
sensors data from the robotic fish to the controlling PC, a respond to objects in their vicinity, one for each side on the
wireless connection between them is required. WiFi module, head of the robotic fish; left, right, front, up, and down, see
which is small expansion board, could be easily interfaced Fig. 12.
with the serial port of the robotic fish microcontroller. The
range of WiFi is about 400m in air, and underwater it is about
40cm which is suitable for communication in the case of
surface or shallow water swimming. The WiFi transceiver
used in this work is an off the shelf commercially available
module type WiFi-Plus-click MRF24WB0MA from
MikroElektronika [6].
Fig. 12. Position of the IR sensors on the head of the robotic fish. Shown
VIII.THE BATTERY OF ROBOTIC FISH is the activation of IR sensors with respect to relative wall angle. Green lines
show which sensors that are not activated, while red lines show which sensors
Each underwater AUV requires a power pack for that are activated.
energizing the controllers, actuators, communication module
and the sensors. A DC battery which can be recharged is X. CAMERA AND DVR
preferred for this purpose because of its low cost, easy to Many applications for underwater robots require the use of
handle, replaced and reload. The robotic fish was provided camera for underwater vision. The application may be one or
with three small battery packs, a 7.4 volt / 2100 mAh each to more of the following; target seeking, searching for lost
power the robot circuits. objects, objects identification, robot localization and mapping,
IX. ROBOTIC FISH SENSORS obstacles and collision avoidance, underwater laid-cable
tracking and inspection. The wireless RF camera used in this
The required sensors for the designed robotic fish would be work run at frequency range of (900-1200 MHz) and it
demonstrated in the following sections. Various types of produces a video stream with a resolution of 320x240 pixels
sensors are required in order to measure the robotic fish and it was fixed at the head of robotic fish [11]. It sends its
position, velocity, acceleration, heading, depth in water, pitch signal to the receiver that is connected to the PC through a
angle, rolling …etc. USB Digital Video Recorder (DVR) [12].
A. Pressure Sensor XI. SERVO MOTORS
The depth of the underwater robot can be measured
The robotic fish uses four servomotors in its tail assembly.
indirectly through the measurement of the pressure using a
Two of the servos are sub-micro sized waterproof servos type
suitable pressure sensor. The Freescale pressure sensor
TRA2065 from Traxxas [13]. They are used to actuate the last
MPX4115 was used.
two links in the tail structure. The other two servos are
B. Digital Compass standard size servos type MG995 from TowerPro. These
A digital magnetic compass type LSM303DLHC from servos are used for actuating the remaining two links.
MikroElektronika was attached to the microcontroller of the XII.VISUAL BASIC MONITORING AND CONTROLLING PROGRAM
robotic fish through I2C interface lines. The compass FOR PC
measures the yaw-orientation of the robotic fish with referring
to the earth‟s magnetic field [8]. In order to control and monitor the underwater robotic fish,
a Visual-Basic program was written for this purpose. The GUI
C. Accelerometer of this program was shown in Fig 13.
The acceleration of the robotic fish in the x, y, and z
direction can be measured using an embedded accelerometer.
The Accel Click from MikroElektronika is a small three-axis
accelerometer and it was used for this purpose [9]. This sensor
is connected to the host microcontroller using I2C interfacing
lines. The signal will be used to determine the speed and then
the position of the robotic fish after integration.
D. Infrared Distance Sensor
This is an analog sensor which is widely used for mobile
robot especially for tasks like; collision avoidance, obstacles
avoidance and walls detection. An example of this type of
sensors is a GP2Y0A21YK from Sharp [10]. It is a low cost,
small (4.5x1.5x1.25cm), supply voltage range, 4.5V–5.5V and
low current (35 mA). In addition to the detection range of the Fig. 13. GUI of the V.B. monitoring and control program.
sensor(s) to be used, the number of sensors required is of great
 2016 Al-Sadeq International Conference on Multidisciplinary in IT and Communication Science
and Applications (AIC-MITCSA) – IRAQ (9-10) May
The program was designed to perform the following tasks;
connecting to a specific robotic fish in order to send the
desired commands, acquiring and display the robotic state
vector that consisting of, (Depth, Pitch angle, roll angle and
yaw angle), setting the required undulation angle for the
robotic fish tail, fish speed, swimming path whether it is
straight or circular. The program also receive the video stream
of the robot embedded RF wireless camera and displaying it
on the GUI. The received video would be configured through
the format menu shown by pressing the format button on the
GUI menu of the program and also could be captured by
pressing the capture button. The V.B. GUI also contains a
buttons for connecting, disconnecting the communication with
the robots. The selection of the target robot for sending the
control commands would be according to the selected robot IP
and port number. The communication with the robotic fishes
would be through the WiFi link and this was accomplished
through the use of socket object inserted in the V.B program.
The operator may send one of the following commands, when
the robot is in the ROV mode;
- Left, right, up, down or reset as a direction commands,
- Narrow or wide tail fin undulation,
- Normal, fast or slow fish swimming speed, and,
- Straight, circular, C-turning or S-manoeuvring robot
swimming style.
XIII. ROBOT‟S MICROCONTROLLERS PROGRAMS
As mentioned previously the robotic fish has two
microcontrollers, one for the communication with PC via
WiFi link to receive the operator commands sent from the PC
during ROV mode of operation and acquiring the robotic fish
sensors data, and the other microcontroller is used for
implementing the operators command sent from the first
microcontroller to control the diving water pump and the
servo motors that actuating the fish tail in addition to
acquiring the readings of the five IR proximity sensors used
for obstacle and collision avoidance.
XIV.EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The following are the pictures of the robotic fish during its
swimming and performing the various swimming movements.
The robotic fish straight, C-turn and S-maneuver movements
are shown in Fig. 14a, Fig. 14b and Fig. 14c.
(a)
(b)
(c)
Fig. 14. The robotic fish during swimming, a) Straight. b) C-turning. c) S-
manoeuvring.
XV. CONCLUSION
The purpose of this research is to construct a fully
autonomous robot which can navigates and interacts with its
environment precisely on the basis of sensory feedback
without intervention from a human operator. The designed
robotic fish was based on the biomimetic of a Carp fish. For
this reason, a sophisticated study about the physiology and
biomechanics of the live Carp fish was performed. The
servomotors were used as the main actuators of the designed
robotic fish, which imitate the muscle action. A set of sensors,
which mimic the animal sensorial system was used to avoid
collision with obstacles, predators, and other agents. This in
addition to many navigational sensors which were used to
generate the required feedback control signals necessary in the
control commands production. Biomimetic controllers that are
relied on the principles of control systems seen in vertebrate
animals, like fish, were also designed and implemented. The
behaviour of the robotic fish during the swimming in the
autonomous mode was designed to cope with that of the live
Carp fish. The experimental results show the effectiveness of
the proposed design and its realistic in mimetic the live Carp
fish.
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