If you ever wanted proof that the more robotics can mimic nature, the more realistic (or creepy), and effective they'll be, look no further than the remarkable soft-tissue robot fish from MIT graduate student Andrew Marchese, which can apparently turn and swim away as well as a real fish.
The fully self-contained, autonomous robot features a rigid, 3D-printed head that contains the power source, computer, motors and sensors. The back-end of the body is made primarily of silicon (with a 3D-printed tail) and, according to Marchese, who built the swimming bot with a team of developers and programmers at Massachusetts Institute of technology, it's where they store all the natural movement parts. That construction, it turns out, also mimics the physiology of a real fish, with its brain contained in the rigid bony area up front and all the soft, pliable and movable material (mostly muscle) responsible for the fish's undulating motion in the back.
See also: Robot Fish Swims Long Distances for Underwater Research
That soft-body construction is one reason why MIT's robot fish can perform an "escape maneuver" as well as a real fish. According to the MIT team, a real fish turns its body in under one millisecond to escape prey and the robot fish accomplishes this task in the same amount of time.
"This shows soft robots might be more capable than hard robots," said Marchese.
Marchese's robot fish certainly isn't the first and it won't be the last. The scientists are already hard at work on the next edition. It's designed to replace carbon dioxide with water to inflate the channels running through the robot fish's tail and should be able to swim for almost a half an hour.
So just how long is it before our fishing lures unexpectedly bring up robot fish instead of the real thing?