Abstract
We designed and implemented fish robots for various purposes such as autonomous navigation, maneuverability control, posture balancing and improvement of quick turns in a tank of 120 X 120 X 180cm size. Typically, fish robots have 30-50 X 15-25 X 10-20cm dimensions; length, width and height, respectively. It is essential to have the ability of quick and smooth turning to avoid collision with obstacles or walls of the water pool at a close distance. Infrared distance sensors are used to detect obstacles, magneto-resistive sensors are used to read direction information, and a two-axis accelerometer is mounted to compensate output of direction sensors. Because of the swing action of its head due to the tail fin movement, the outputs of an infrared distance sensor contain a huge amount of noise around true distances. With the information from accelerometers and e-compass, much improved distance data can be obtained by fuzzy logic based estimation. Successful swimming and smooth turns without collision demonstrated the effectiveness of the distance estimation.
