Fish school: mapping mechanisms leading to complex collective behaviors and application to swimming robots

In a number of living systems, collective motions are a practical strategy to adapt to environmental conditions. For instance, finding the best source of food involve exploring gradients of nutriments and escaping predators may involve reading other individual reactions.
While this strategy seems to be universal from fish to birds and bacteria, the underlying mechanisms are often unclear, especially in the biomimetic perspective of creating artificial systems showing similar behaviors.
In this context, our interest will be focused on the collective behaviors in fish schools with a long-term perspective to produce autonomous swimming robots.
Thus, during the course of the internship, we will address these aspects to answer both fundamental and practical questions like:
•    What triggers an individual motion in a fish school?
•    What triggers the collective behaviours?
•    What are the best displacement mechanisms for artificial swimmers?
•    How to generate feedback mechanisms
In practice, the candidate will be involved in the many steps of the project, with an initial period to define its precise content.
Then, he/she will then be offered to further develop one or several aspects among the following ones
-    Experimental development of fish robots equipped with flow sensors
-    Acquisition of flow parameters in a test tank
-    Study  of different feedback mechanisms
-    Implementation of a handling system based on 3D printer actuators
-    Comparison with numerical models performed in a separate project

Website :

https://www-liphy.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/-MOVE-




 
Published on October 21, 2021
Updated on November 28, 2023