Cooperative Control of Multiple Biomimetic Robotic Fish

Abstract

. As we know, fish shoals, bird flocks, etc exhibit typical aggregation behaviours, in which collective motions are employed to achieve useful tasks, e.g., avoiding predators, capturing prey, and breeding offspring. Similarly, when coordinating in unstructured or dynamic environments, it is possible that a team of relatively simple and cheap agents are capable of accomplishing complex tasks that exceed the capabilities of one single agent. In the robotic context, multi-robot systems presenting as distributed solutions have advantages such as increasing robustness to unexpected disturbances, fault-tolerance, thanks to redundancy, self-adaptation, and self-organization. Thus, applications of multi-robot systems are associated with a large group of autonomously functioning vehicles in the air, on land or sea or underwater, to jointly perform tasks such as demining operations, environmental surveillance, object transportation, search and rescue, and so forth (Kumar et al.,