A novel closed-loop robotic fish experimental system based on ROS
As an excellent underwater biorobotics, robotic fish has got considerable development in recent decades. However the majority of researches assume that the flow field where the fish swims is a steady one, ignoring the fact that fish in nature has to deal with diverse flow fields. This takes part of responsibility for the low efficiency of robotic fish comparing with live one. In this paper, we present one experimental system which could form steady flow field and utilize the information collected from it on the robot as closed-loop control feedback. With this information we can infer the state of flow so that we can manipulate the robot to adopt corresponding swimming strategy which could increase the swimming efficiency markedly. To get information on the flow field we employ pressure transducer attached on the robotic fish prototype to detect the water surrounding the robot. And this system takes advantage of robot operating system (ROS) ensuring its flexibility and extensibility in future improvement. An experiment conducted on this platform indicates it can distinguish the speed of flow, verifying its feasibility and capability to conduct other experiments on closed-loop control.