The Research on Efficiency of Bionic Robotic Fish Cruising Formation

Bionic robotic fish is an important branch of underwater robot research. At present, most of the bionic robotic fish research focuses on the behavior of a single robot but ignores the influence of the robot swarms. Robot swarms play an important role in cases focusing on the environment. It is necessary to develop robot cruising formation for water environment detection. In this paper, we use Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method to simulate three kinds of diamond bionic robotic fish cruising formations in the typical hydrological environment. The efficiency of three cruising formations is compared by changing the composition of diamond formations and the spacing between bionic robotic fishes. The results show that the greater thrust and the smaller lateral power loss lead to the higher efficiency of the bionic robotic fish formation. The average thrust of bionic robotic fish formation is large when the spacing between the front and rear fishes is small. When the spacing between abreast bionic robotic fishes is large, the average lateral power loss caused by the swing of fishes is small. According to the results, the suitable formation can be selected for an efficient cruise under different environments, tasks and real-time communication requirements.