MIT built a robot fish for exploring coral reefs

Coral reefs are really important in the ecosystem. And this new fancy robot fish from MIT can help us explore them!

In case you didn’t know, coral reefs are in grave danger. Because of humans being humans, and climate change, a lot of coral reefs are getting destroyed. These are a habitat for many fish and other aquatic animals. And if we loose more coral reefs, we could throw the entire ocean ecosystem out of whack. And because of this, scientists need to get closer to the reefs to take a better look, but they don’t want to disturb the animals.

This is where SoFi comes to play. From the outside, it look really close to a real fish. It is so life like, that the surrounding fish don’t even seem to care, and just ignore SoFi. While it might look normal from the outside, inside, it is very complex. It can operate for around 40 minutes before needing a recharge.

“To our knowledge, this is the first robotic fish that can swim untethered in three dimensions for extended periods of time,” MIT CSAIL PhD candidate Robert Katzschmann, lead author of a new paper published in Science Robotics, explains. “We are excited about the possibility of being able to use a system like this to get closer to marine life than humans can get on their own.”