Ostraciiform inspired Robotic Fish

Driven by my passion for research in robotics, under the guidance of Dr. Santhakumar Mohan and Mr. Jagadeesh Kadiyam (Ph.D. student), I worked on a research project in the field of robotics parallel with the academics at Center for Robotics and Control, IIT Indore.

The vehicle is propelled primarily by three rigid fins actuated by three servomotors individually. All the fins are attached directly to servo motor shafts to decrease frictional/mechanical losses during their movement. The caudal fin gives the required thrust, and two pectoral fins help change the attitude of the vehicle as well provide additional thrust whenever required. In addition to this, We have onboard buoyancy module, as well as a moving-mass mechanism that would shift the center of gravity of the fish. These two actuation mechanism coupled with the control surfaces of pectoral fin allows the fish to glide.

I Performed CFD-MBD co-simulations to estimate the thrust generated by oscillating fin propulsion scheme, the results of which were used to develop a robust control scheme articulated in the publication published on IFAC PapersOnline.

I learned about dynamic modeling of underwater robots during this project. Understanding the different terms of the differential equations, I developed a virtual test rig for high fidelity simulations to analyze and optimize the control scheme. This helped in high fidelity simulations the robotic fish and its motion and orientation control using the oscillating fin propulsion coupled with onboard buoyancy module and CG shift mechanism

I interfaced MSC ADAMS ( For simulating high fidelity Multi-body Physics) with MATLAB & Simulink (To give control inputs to ADAMS plant from the state information provided by it).