ScaFi: A Robot that Grows Like a Fish, Not a Machine—From 2 Feet to Nearly 10

Scalable robot fish can easily swim in a creek or lake

Robot fish have come a long way from the novelty Big Mouth Billy Bass of the late 90s. Today, marine life researchers worldwide embed various types of more advanced robots into fish habitats (instead of on basement walls). These sophisticated fish-bots do everything from monitoring at-risk coral reefs to waging war on invasive species.  But there’s a core limitation to most of those designs. Each fish robot is just one size. That means research…

AI and Robotics Archives

Underwater robots built to monitor a creek can’t simply scale up to patrol a lake, at least not without engineers starting the design from scratch each time. A new fish-inspired robot called ScaFi solves that problem with a single structural tweak. It lets the same basic design stretch from 2 feet to nearly 10 feet long, without losing its swimming gait. Nana Obayashi, now an assistant professor at NYU Tandon, led the project as a doctoral resea…

ScaFi: A robot that grows like a fish, not a machine—from 2 feet to nearly 10

Propeller-powered underwater vehicles have long helped scientists explore and monitor aquatic environments. But they're limited by their own mechanics: Spinning blades can snag on vegetation, stir up sediment and startle ...

A Robot That Grows Like a Fish, Not Like a Machine

Most fish-inspired robots only work at one size, so monitoring a creek versus a lake means building two robots from scratch. ScaFi solves this by scaling from 0.6m to 2.9m off one blueprint, just thickening the flexible tail rods. Tested in creeks, a Swiss stream, and Lake Geneva, it kept the same gait across sizes.