The Research And Development Of Microrobot-fish With IPMC Actuator

The swimming performance of fish has so many excellent characters, such as high efficiency, low noise and outstanding submerged maneuverability, that scientists hope to design the robot which can imitate fish swimming to serve the human. Since conventional robot fish has complex mechanical structure driven by electromotor, it is difficult to miniaturize. With technology advancing, a kind of new robot fish actuated by intelligent materials is developed. Comparing to the traditional robot fish, the new type of robot fish has some good characteristics such as low noise, easy application and convenient miniaturization.Ion-exchange polymer-metal composite (IPMC) is a new kind of flexible smart material, which can be driven by low voltage and has outstanding responding character. In this thesis, a system that consists of microrobot-fish and base station is designed. The microrobot-fish can send infrared and ultrasonic signals to the base station. The base station can receive these signals and measuring time difference that is used to calculate the distances from the robot to the stations, furthermore this information transmitted to the robot through Zigbee wireless net. The temperature sensor and digital compass are also fitted in the robot, which can detect the information about the robot. The information is packed with distance datum and sends to PC. The computer uses distances via location algorithm to determine planar coordinates of the robot. Coordinates of the robot, temperature and angle can be displayed by the GUI. The thesis also briefly analyses the mechanism of swimming fish, and design the plastic shell of robot fish base on the swimming fish characteristics.Through the experiment, the performance of the robot fish is tested. Firstly, the speed of robot fish is tested by changing frequency of driven signal. Secondly, the communication function between the robot fish and base station is confirmed and accuracy of distance measuring system is analyzed. Finally, it is verified the function to display the coordinates of the robot, temperature and angle by means of the GUI.