This week Horace and I began full time work on a project in Prof. Porfiri's lab. Our project goal is to build a third generation (3-G) robotic platform for studying fish response to robotic fish. The existing two platforms are restricted to motion in a horizontal plane - our platform will add a 4th degree of freedom (currently there is X, Y translation and rotation in the X-Y plane; we are adding a servo for the Z dimension).

The project has several components: research into existing studies of robotic fish systems, designing and building the 3-G platform, programming control of a 4-servo system, and conducting engineering analysis of the platform to describe constraints and limitations of the system. Since we are not able to conduct research with live animals we will not be designing experiments to use the platform, but we are hoping to observe current research with the existing platforms.

This week we made progress in all areas of the project: we designed and printed the attachment hardware necessary for adding a linear actuator to the existing armature and improving the link to the rotation servo (and adapting this link for vertical movement).

We researched several relevant papers on fish response to robotic systems. We spent several hours learning SolidWorks CAD software, and we began learning an integrated development environment (IDE) for developing Arduino program to control the new 4-servo platform. Currently, we can create simple geometric shapes using an Arduino microcontroller and we are reverse engineering the existing software program for controlling the 2D platform.

We have begun rough-sketching our presentation and research paper for this project. We have photo-documentation of various stages of ongoing work (it is easy to get caught up in the project and forget to document!) and are working out the design/formatting approach for these deliverables.