Mohammad Asadian - PHd Candidate - School of Mechanical engineering
Majid Abbaspour - Professor - School of Mechanical engineering

This paper presents characteristics of Trout caudal fin and body wave motion quantitatively.These parameters are concerned with design of an improved kinematic propulsive robot fish morphologically. In steady swimming mode, Swimming speed of crangiform fish adjusted by three parameters: oscillating frequency, amplitude and the length of oscillatory part. Its orientation is tuned by different joint’s deflections. In order to determine the appropriatemechanism, experimental studies on trout swimming are fulfilled with DPIV3 and image processing methods and optimal equations of motion are empirically derived. The oscillating amplitude increases dramatically from 1/3 of body and is very small near the head. So the second order function which describes wave amplitude of Trout undulatory movement equation was found and the oscillatory motion of the robot fish with artificial body will be designed according to this equation. In this method within an aquarium using a high speed digital camera (Cube 3) up to 128000 fps and a 4000mW laser source, imaging the mechanism of swimming is performed and using image processing code to find experimentally the optimal coefficients of the motion equation, appropriate location of joints and so on.

Robot fish, Fish modeling, Image processing, Fish Hydrodynamics, DPIV