A School of Robotic Fish for Mariculture Monitoring in the Sea Coast

Abstract

This paper presents a multi-agent robotic fish system used for mariculture monitoring. Autonomous robotic fish is designed to swim underwater to collect marine information such as water temperature and pollution level. Each robotic fish has 5 degrees of freedom for controlling its depth and speed by mimicking a sea carp. Its bionic body design enables it to have high swimming efficiency and less disturbance to the surrounding sea lives. Several onboard sensors are equipped for autonomous 3D navigation tasks such as path planning, obstacle avoidance and depth maintenance. A robotic buoy floating on the water surface is deployed as a control hub to communicate with individual robots, which in turn form a multi-agent system to monitor and cover a large scale sea coast cooperatively. Both laboratory experiments and field testing have been conducted to verify the feasibility and performance of the proposed multi-agent system.