Fish-Inspired Swimming Simulation and Robotic Implementation

This paper describes our efforts to develop a Digital Fish Simulator (DFS), particularly aiming at creating a controlled kinematic centered environment to further shed light on how to design and control artificial fish robots. Compared to a 3D simulator for autonomous robotic fish by Liu and Hu, an improved body wave equation capable of multimodal swimming motions is adopted in our simulator and artificial swimming data can be further imported enabling various fictive swimming patterns. Furthermore, the swimming data generated from the simulator can directly be fed into the fish robots for verification, and vice versa. Finally, a series of fishlike robots with different mechanical design have been built to validate our well-formed ideas and to reach a new level of performance close to actual fish for real applications.