On April 24, invited by Professor Guangming Xie of COE Peking University Dr. Xiaobo Tan who worked in Michigan State University, gave a seminar entitled “Falling with Style – Gliding Robotic Fish Patrol Waters with Ease” at room 434 mechanics Building Peking University. Prof. Guangming Xie hosted this event.

Autonomous robots are playing an increasingly important role in surveying and monitoring underwater environments.  In this talk Dr. Tan presented a new type of underwater robots, termed gliding robotic fish, which adopted the salient features of both underwater gliders and robotic fish. Like underwater gliders, it was capable of energy-efficient gliding; on the other hand, it could swim and maneuver with an actively controlled tail fin. In particular, Dr. Tan focused on how the tail was used in concert with the gliding mechanism to realize novel, energy-efficient spiral motion in the three-dimensional space, a useful application of which is the sampling of water columns. Modeling and feedback control of the spiral motion presented in this talk, along with experimental results from sampling harmful algae distribution in Wintergreen Lake, Michigan. Finally, Dr. Tan briefly discussed two ongoing multi-investigator projects that used schools of gliding robotic fish to monitor and understand harmful algal blooms, and to track the movement of acoustically tagged live fish in the Great Lakes, respectively.

Dr. Xiaobo Tan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Mechanical Engineering (by courtesy) at Michigan State University (MSU). He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in automatic control from Tsinghua University, China, in 1995 and 1998, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2002. His research interests include bio-inspired underwater robots and their application to environmental sensing, electroactive polymer sensors and actuators, and modeling and control of systems with hysteresis.  Dr. Tan directs an NSF Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Site on Robotics Engineering at MSU. He serves on the editorial boards of Automatica, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, and International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems. He served as the Program Chair of the 2011 International Conference on Advanced Robotics, and is currently serving as the Finance Chair of the 2015 American Control Conference.  Dr. Tan has (co)authored one book (Biomimetic Robotic Artificial Muscles) and over 60 journal papers, and holds one US patent with two more pending. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2006), MSU Teacher-Scholar Award (2010), and several Best Paper Awards.