A robotic spy among the fish

A new miniature robot developed by EPFL researchers can swim with fish, learn how they communicate with each other and make them change direction or come together. These capabilities have been proven on schools of zebrafish. Researchers at EPFL's Robotic Systems Laboratory (LSRO), which is headed by Professor Francesco Mondada, have developed a miniature robot that can integrate perfectly into schools of zebrafish. Their work was carried out as part of an EU research program among six partner institutions,* and the findings were recently published in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics. "We created a kind of 'secret agent' that can infiltrate these schools of small fish," says Frank Bonnet with a smile. Bonnet is a post-doc researcher at the LSRO and one of the study's authors. The robot is seven centimeters long - longer than the fish it's modeled after but with the same shape and proportions.