Fish-like Sensors for Underwater Robots

Roland Piquepaille writes "Today, both submarine and surface ships use sonar for navigation. But sonar and other vision systems face various limitations. So why not imitating fish? For millions of years, fish have relied on 'a row of specialized sensory organs along the sides of their bodies, called the lateral line' to avoid predators or to find preys. So engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have decided to build an artificial lateral line for submarines and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The first tests have been successful, and we can now envision a day where AUVs could detect and track moving underwater targets or avoid collisions with moving or stationary objects."

Comments

So why not imitating fish?

[thepotoo]

So why not imitating fish?

Truly, this is a question that will plague both scientists and engrish majors for years to come.

Why not?

[djdbass]

Indeed. Why not imitating fish? All your gills are belong us.

Er... new?

[gardyloo]

As far as I can tell from the article (hah!), the flow-sensors aren't new, though they may be uniquely orientable with applied magnetic fields. Really, this just looks (to me) as though it's a low-frequency linear acoustic array, and those have been used for a LONG time for this sort of thing. It seems to me that the individual sensors might be what are actually of interest.

There's a very good reason why not

[IdahoEv]

The article implies that we could replace sonar with the lateral line:

But sonar and other vision systems face various limitations. So why not imitating fish?

The lateral line is truly an amazing organ. It senses pressure and flow at numerous points on both flanks of fish, and that information helps it swim efficiently and indeed locate prey and avoid predators.

But it's fundamentally a local signal, because it can only detect within a certain range and with limited resolution. A fish can't use the lateral line to make sense of the 3D shape of an object ten meters away, because that information simply isn't transferred through the water that far.

Sonar can indeed do that, and can locate and take velocity measurements on objects *miles* away. So useful, in fact, that dolphins use it as one of their primary sensory systems, apparently getting almost as much detail from sonar as they do from vision.

A lateral line may be a very useful addition to an underwater craft, but it can't replace it as the summary implies. (TFA is smarter, BTW. Go figure.).