In the past few years, we have covered plenty of bio-inspired robots here. These robots are designed to swim like a school of fish in a coordinated way. Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering developed these robots to coordinate their movement without external control.
Blueswarm has a vision-based coordination system based on blue LED lights. As they explain:
Each underwater robot, called a Bluebot, is equipped with two cameras and three LED lights. The on-board, fish-lens cameras detect the LEDs of neighboring Bluebots and use a custom algorithm to determine their distance, direction and heading. Based on the simple production and detection of LED light, the researchers demonstrated that the Blueswarm could exhibit complex self-organized behaviors, including aggregation, dispersion and circle formation.
[HT]