Design of high speed fish-like robot ‘Ichthus V5.7’

Until a recent date, bio-inspired robotics has been very challenging issue on robotics area. Among these categories, fish-like underwater robots have been lively investigated, expecting some advantages from mimicking real fish's great maneuverability and high energy efficiency. On the other hand, there are still diverse problems regarding operation of the robotic fish in the real environment such as in the river or ocean for detecting water pollution. In order to use the robot in the real environment, the robot has to have relatively fast speed to overcome the flow rate of the river. In this paper, we mainly describe development of a robotic fish which can provide faster swimming performance than our previous development. The robotic fish `Ichthus V5.7' has a 3-DOF serial link-mechanism for its propulsion, 1-DOF for up and down motion with its pectoral fins. Several sensors to navigate autonomously in the real environment like river are embedded. The developed robotic system can be used as an environmental monitoring system for monitoring pollution or quality of river with higher speed.