Multiple Autonomous Robotic Fish Collaboration

Abstract

Most of previous work on multiple robots collaboration is focused on terrestrial robots and seldom deals with underwater applications due to the uncertainties and complexity in a hydroenvironment. In this chapter, three typical collaboration problems with multiple autonomous robotic fish are investigated. The three problems includes target tracking and collision avoidance, formation control, and cooperative transportation. For the first problem, a situated-behavior-based decentralized control is employed on each robotic fish according to its visual data. On dealing with motion planning of the fish during target tracking and collision avoidance, a control law by a combination of an attractive force toward a target and a repulsive force for collision avoidance is utilized. For the formation control problem, leader-following based framework is adopted. Each follower robot estimates the position and orientation angle of its leader with a fast color-tracking vision system, and establishes a Bezier trajectory between its current position and the position of its leader robot. For the cooperative transportation problem, an underwater box-pushing task is designed in which three autonomous robotic fish that sense, plan and act on its own move an elongated box from some initial location to a goal location. The whole task is decomposed into three subtasks and assigned to capable robotic fish. The robotic fish coordinate through explicit communications and distribute the subtasks with a market-based dynamic task allocation method.