Artificial lateral line design for robotic fish

Abstract

Fishes can avoid colliding with obstacles and track baits depending on the lateral distributed sense nodes which can sense the pressure variances of the surrounding flow field. Moreover, the interacted acoustic pressure field between the tail and the wall can provide useful information of the fish location by extracting the physical meaning of the sense node's measurement. Therefore, this study provides a high efficiency but low cost piezoelectric material, PVDF, and discusses how the external disturbances affect it and result the output form in voltage which could be used as a biomimetic sensor that attached on the sides of a robotic fish to measure the underwater acoustic pressure. By using the image source method, the most efficient sensing position of the PVDF sensor could be decided. Lastly, we discuss the optimal choosing strategy of the PVDF's length as pressure sensor to make sure to obtain the best performance.