When the Office of Advanced Technologies and Programs of the CIA started to conduct some fish-focused studies during the 1990s, Charlie, the jive-talking cartoon tuna mascot popularized by Leo Burnett Agency's Tom Rogers in 1961, must have appeared like the ideal code name for their project.
The only difference is that CIA's Charlie was not a tuna. It was a catfish, and a robot. More accurately, Charlie was an unmanned underwater vehicle or UUV, designed to secretly retrieve water samples.
Catfish Charlie's handler controlled it through a line-of-sight radio handset. According to a report from IEEE Spectrum, not much has been divulged about the construction of this robotic fish except that its body had a ballast system, pressure hall and communications system. Its tail on the other hand, housed the propulsion.
With a 61-cenemeter-length, catfish Charlie would reportedly not set any record for being the biggest fish. Some catfish species can grow to two meters.
Whether this robotic fish reeled in any functional intel remains unknown as information on its missions remain classified.
Robots Remain in the Exploration of Watery Environments
The CIA was not the only one when it comes to pursuit of UUVs. It was not a pioneer either among agencies to do so.
In the United States, such a study started seriously during the 1950s, with the funding of technology of the US Navy for deep-see rescue, as well as salvage operations.
Principal and electrical computer engineer Aaron Marburg, who works on UUVs at the Applied Physics Laboratory of the University of Washington noted that the oceans worldwide are largely off-limits to manned vessels.
The engineer explained that the nature of the oceans is that they can only be explored through the use of robots. Therefore, to discover the uncharted regions, he continued to explain, they are forced to address technical issues and make the robots work.
Fish-Inspired Robots
Since self-propelled underwater research vehicle or SPURV, there have been many other UUVs coming in different sizes and shapes, for several missions, developed in the US and elsewhere.
The UUVs, as well as their so-called autonomous cousins, the AUVs, are currently routinely used for scientific studies, education and surveillance.
At least, some of these robots have been fish-inspired inventions. For example, during the mid-1990s, MIT engineers worked on RoboTuna, which they nicknamed Charlie.
Developed loosely on a blue-fin tuna, it comprised an impulsion system mimicking a real fish's tail fin. This was quite a major retreat from the propellers or screws used on UUVs.
However, Charlie didn't ever swim on its own. It was constantly fastened to a set of instruments. The MIT team's next initiative, a RoboPike the group called Wanda, overcame such a limitation. Not only that. It also swam liberally, although it never learned to avoid running into its tank's sides.
25 years after, a team from Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory or CSAIL of MIT introduced SoFi, as seen on MITCSAIL's YouTube video below, an invention they described as a decidedly 'fishier' robot designed with the ability to swim next to real fish minus all the disturbance.
Regulated by a retrofitted Super Nintendo handset, this robotic fish had the ability to dive over 15 meters, manage its own buoyancy, and swim around for a maximum of 40 minutes between battery charges.
Sofi, Wanda and the two Charlies are all examples of biomimetics. This is a term invented in the early 1970s to describe the study of biological processes, structures, mechanisms and substances. Essentially, biomimetics studies nature to inspire design.
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