Invasion of the Fishbots-in 3-D! No, that's not a pitch for a basic-cable creature feature. It's the latest in submersible robotics. Previous autonomous underwater vehicles had a problem: They could move laterally but couldn't dive like fish. "Two-D motions have been well studied," says Xu Jianxin, who researches AUV locomotion at the National University of Singapore. "But there is no research for 3-D patterns." So Xu's team spent three years analyzing the movements of carp. The result: bots that float, dive, and make sharp 85-degree turns. Using actuators, waterproofing materials, and two air tanks as ballast, the piscoids swim with the fluid elegance of their scale-and-blood counterparts. And they're quiet-maybe too quiet.
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