VIDEO: Homer, the overweight robotic fish
Over the holidays, ERR.ee will examine the famed e-Estonia. In the first of five stories, we meet Homer, a robotic fish built by the Tallinn University of Technology (TTU) biorobotics specialists, who gives researchers the "inside view" of a river pass. This will help to understand why the fish use some fishways, but not others.
A few dozen researchers have worked on the FishView project for almost a year now. They have built the first prototype, a rainbow trout who, for his slight overweight, has been christened Homer, after Homer Simpson.
The prototype has sensors that record the signals in the water flow. This helps scientists to understand how the flow patters of functional fishpasses differ from non-functional ones and thus to build fishpasses that migrating fish will actually use.
ERR interviewed Juan Francisco Fuentes Perez and Naveed Muhammad who work on the FishView project.
Both researchers said that TTU has a world class biorobotics center. "The work we do here is very innovative. There are only two or three labs in the world that are working on the topic I am interested in," Muhammad said.
*The video also features a robot turtle, a little underwater robot called U-CAT, that will one day help underwater archaeologists to inspect shipwrecks.
Editor: M. Roon, K. Tooming, M. Oll, S. Tambur
