Fish demonstrate great dexterity as they feed in both the water column (floating prey) and on substrates (fixed prey). We are working across multiple projects to understand and apply fish feeding-inspired mechanisms to enhance the manipulation abilities of underwater robots. In suction feeding, fish capture floating prey by pulling water into their mouth. We employed suction flow at the fingertips of a humanoid hand and found that gentle suction conditions, on the order of 1N of force, improve the rapid capture of floating objects up to 10 kg. To study feeding on stationary prey, we measured the forces and motions of the sunburst butterflyfish (Chaetodon kleinii) as it took bites off a fixed, soft prey. We observed characteristic behaviors of the fish, including a lateral head-flick for prey shearing and tearing. We constructed a robophysical model of the sunburst butterflyfish in order to characterize the effect of this head-flick action. In both robophysical projects, we found that simple template models in dynamic simulation provide accurate predictions of robot behaviors. This surprising simplicity supports rapid parametric study of the effects of suction and body motion in these cases.
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Publication: Romero, J., Stuart, H. S., & Wainwright, P. (2022). 3D feeding behavior of Chaetodon kleinii on sessile prey. Journal of Experimental Biology, 1–9. Under review.<br><br>Wang, S., Romero, J., Li, M., Wainwright, P., & Stuart, H. S. (2022). Bioinspired tearing manipulation with a robotic fish. In 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (pp. 1–7). Under review.<br><br>Stuart, H. S., Wang, S., & Cutkosky, M. R. (2018). Tunable contact conditions and grasp hydrodynamics using gentle fingertip suction. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 35(2), 295–306
Presenters
Hannah S Stuart
University of California at Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley
Authors
Hannah S Stuart
University of California at Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley
