According to researchers, the ocean is one of the most poorly explored places on our planet. While observing the underwater inhabitants is not so easy. Most of the fish and other inhabitants of the sea are fast, skittish and secretive. Now for the observations are rather large robots, but, according to the publication Robotics Science, researchers from Peking University found more elegant solution: they developed a robot that is attached to a marine animal that travels with them and is collecting the right data.
The head of a group of scientists Whether Wen emphasizes that the harm in this case, marine animals and ecology of these “sea spies” do not strike. Like many other inventions, it was inspired by nature, namely the livelihoods of fish-prilipaly. The main advantage of robots of this type is that they don’t have to hunt down the necessary objects for observation. This must be done only once.
The robot looks like the following: this soft “pillow”, similar in shape to a fish’s fin. This “pillow” placed more than a thousand tiny spikes of carbon fiber, attached to special plates that regulate their position. If you are frightened by the word “spikes”, don’t worry: this mechanism is almost completely mimics the natural version of fish and Remora does not harm the “host”. Device “spy tracker” withstands weight in excess of their own in 340 times. Scientists say that robots of this type can be very useful: they will track the movement of the sea inhabitants to build maps to mark places of habitat of rare inhabitants of the sea, and even to discover new types of animals.
Submitted sticky the marine spy robot
Vladimir Kuznetsov