Recently, Festo, a well-known automation technology company from Germany, released a new underwater bionic robot called BionicFinWave. The robot's flexible fin drive is free from dependence on supporting elements, so it has unique advantages in flexibility and agility.
Among marine organisms, turbellarians, squids and naked hip fish swim differently from ordinary fish. When they move, they use their longitudinal fins to generate continuous waves and push their bodies forward along their body length. As the fins rise and fall, the fish pushes water behind them, thereby generating forward thrust. Conversely, these creatures can also swim backwards and provide buoyancy, sinking force or lateral thrust depending on the waveform.
BionicFinWave imitates them and controls its own movement through this fin undulation. The robot moves using its two side fins, which are made entirely of silicone and have no pillars or other supporting elements, so they are extremely flexible and can realistically reproduce the smooth wave movement of biological models.
The two fins are attached to nine small lever arms on the left and right sides and are driven by two servomotors located on the body of the underwater robot. Two adjacent crankshafts transmit the power to the levers, enabling the two fins to move individually. In this way, they can generate different waveforms that are particularly suitable for slow and precise movements and stir up less water than conventional screw drives.
A pressure sensor and an ultrasonic sensor are also installed in the front of the body next to the circuit board with the processor and radio module. These devices continuously measure the distance to the wall and the depth position in the water, thus avoiding collisions between the robot and the pipe system.
The robots can also communicate with each other via radio and transmit data (such as temperature and pressure sensor measurements) to a tablet computer.
The BionicFinWave is expected to be used in fields such as hydrological surveys, wastewater treatment or process industry, for example for detection, measurement or data acquisition tasks in complex underwater environments such as pipelines.
