Engineers create school of robotic fish that can coordinate their movements

A school of robotic fish that are able to coordinate their movements underwater - just like real fish - have been created by a team of engineers. Harvard University experts created the fish-inspired bots to work without any external control, mimicking the collective behaviours groups of fish demonstrate. Schools of fish exhibit complex, synchronised behaviours that help them find food, migrate and evade predators with no one fish coordinating the movements. The robotic fish can synchronise their movements like a real school of fish, without any external control - the first time this complex behaviour has been show in robots. The team say in future a similar swarm of robotic fish could be deployed to perform environmental monitoring and search in fragile environments like coral reefs.