The RoboTuna is a robotic fish project involving a series of robotic fish designed and built by a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

 (MIT) in the US.

The Project

The project started in 1993. Their aim was to investigate the possibility of constructing a robotic submarine that could reproduce the way tunas swim and see if they could find a superior system of propulsion for the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

An autonomous underwater vehicle is a robot which travels underwater without requiring input from an operator. AUVs constitute part of a larger group of undersea systems known as unmanned underwater vehicles, a classification that includes non-autonomous remotely operated underwater vehicles...

 (AUVs). Their experiment was a success as they discovered that their fish was both more manoeuvrable and used less energy than other robotic submarines.The Science Museum in London, UK has one on display in their geophysics and oceanography section.

Improvements

While the early results were successful the RoboTuna was not able to replicate the bursts of acceleration that real tuna were able to manage. Researchers tried a genetic algorithm. Early incarnations worked poorly but as the system evolved the RoboTuna's abilities improved. Visualization techniques showed that the system had evolved so that the RoboTuna was taking advantage of vortices that it created. A swish of its tail one way creating a vortex, which was then used by a swish the other way - propelling it off the vortex it had created. This technique not only helps to with normal swimming but explains the impressive standing start speeds of real tuna.

The Researchers

The team involved in the project included: Michael Triantafyllou

Michael Triantafyllou

Michael Triantafyllou is Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Director of the Center for Ocean Engineering, Head of the Area of Ocean Science and Engineering, and Director of the Testing Tank and Propeller Tunnel Facilities at the Massachusetts...

, David Barrett who built the first RoboTuna (Charlie I) in 1995 for his PhD thesis, and David Beal and Michael Sachinis, who introduced several modification including a cable-pulley system to produce RoboTuna II.