Do you ever just want a robot fish that can infiltrate other schools of fish? Well, you can’t have it (researchers at MIT own it), but it is cool to watch. There is a video below, if you want to watch it yourself.
Basically this robot fish can swim against currents, can take nice photos underwater, and can pretend to be a normal fish, so as to be around actual fish. They also believe that it is the first to be able to swim in three dimensions for long times. It is controlled by a modded SNES controller.
The propulsion works because the back parts are made of flexible silicone. There is something that throws water into two different sections in the tail. By expanding one section, this allows the tail to bend one way, and propel the fish. It alternates quickly to give the constant side-to-side motion. The head simply has all of the electronics, and the camera. The head is made of 3D printed material.
This relates to engineering because they had a problem, not having a cool robot fish that could act like a regular fish, and thus had no way to get much closer to these schools of fish. They solved it by using water pressure in a clever way, to imitate a fish swimming.
