Mar 14, 2014 09:47 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a robotic fish that change direction in the water just as rapidly as a real one.

According to a news release, the creation of the journal Soft Robotics has made newer robots with soft exteriors and fluid motions popular in the scientific community. The result is a self-governing robotic fish that can move very similarly to a real fish.

"We're excited about soft robots for a variety of reasons," project researcher Daniela Rus, an MIT professor of computer science and engineering and director of the school's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, said in the release. "As robots penetrate the physical world and start interacting with people more and more, it's much easier to make robots safe if their bodies are so wonderfully soft that there's no danger if they whack you."

She said soft robots are growing popularity because they take a lot of anxiety out of the planning and building process where a scientist would regularly worry about a collision. Previously, robot creators would place environmental collisions above all else in designing the machine.

The fact that the body deforms continuously gives these machines an infinite range of configurations, and this is not achievable with machines that are hinged," Rus said. "A rigid-body robot could not do continuous bending."

MIT graduate student Andrew Marchese, of the department of electrical engineering and computer science, is the lead author of the Soft Robotics paper and the one who created the robot. A canister of carbon dioxide fuels the fish's abdomen, causing the tail to bend back and forth.

The fish can perform as many as 30 escape maneuvers, depending on its velocity and angle - which can be as extreme as 100 degrees - before it runs out of fuel.

"The fish was designed to explore performance capabilities, not long-term operation," Marchese said in the release. "Next steps for future research are taking that system and building something that's compromised on performance a little bit but increases longevity."

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