Sensing oscillations in unsteady flow for better robotic swimming efficiency

Turbulent flows are often treated as a noisy environment by control algorithms of underwater robots. However, aquatic animals such as fish have learned to take advantage of certain unsteady flow. Periodic complex flow, such as that found in the wake of cylinders has been shown to offer energy saving opportunities to fish. We built a fish-like robot with an integrated pressure sensor array housed in the head. The robot can control its tail beat synchronization with respect to the periodic oscillations in the flow behind a cylinder. We show that vortices, represented here by pressure maxima, can be detected and exploited to increase the swimming efficiency of the robot fish while it remains rigidly mounted to a force plate. Force measurements show an efficiency gain of 23% when the tail beat of the robotic fish is synchronized at a particular phase lag.