Scientists have developed robots with a new sense — lateral line
sensing. All fish have this sensing organ but so far it had no
technological counterpart on human-made underwater vehicles. In
an article published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A,
researchers describe a robotic fish that is controlled with the
help of lateral line sensors. During the last 4 years, the EU
funded European research project FILOSE has investigated fish
lateral line sensing and locomotion with the aims of
understanding how fish detect and exploit flow features, and of
developing efficient underwater robots based on biological
principles. Though flow is a highly volatile and unsteady state
of matter, it can nonetheless be measured and characterized
based on many salient features that do not change much in space
and time (such as flow direction or turbulence intensity, for
example). These salient features can then be described as a
“flowscape” — a flow landscape that helps fish and robots to
orient themselves, navigate and contr