High efficiency in cruising is a determining factor in developing tuna-mimetic robots. So far, a number of tuna-like robots have been made. Nevertheless, the University of Canterbury has developed its own tuna-like robot called UC-Ika 1 to investigate and to accordingly improve the swimming performance of the biomimetic swimming robots. In order to do so, the propulsion system of a tuna with respect to its thrust and resistive forces is studied. Following that, the fish robot is designed and fabricated considering the tuna propulsion system. The robot is then tested several times to investigate its swimming performance. Comparison of the speed and efficiency of UC-Ika 1 with those of other tuna-like robots shows a promising improvement of cruising performance of UC-Ika 1. 1. Introduction The majority of underwater tasks such as monitoring of sea cable and pipelines or pollution search demand a robot with navigation capabilities for a long period of time [1]. For this purpose, biomimetic swimming robots are the most suitable ones due to their fast, very efficient, and highly maneuverable performance [2]. The first biomimetic swimming robot, RoboTuna, was built at MIT in 1994 [3]. In 1997, Vorticity Control Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (VCUUV) was developed based on RoboTuna with some improvement and more capabilities such as avoiding obstacles and having up-down motion [4]. Since then, a number of fish robots with more capabilities are developed [5–8]. The more detailed state of art in robotic fish is presented in [9]. Among the existing fish robots, several robots like RoboTuna and VCUUV are inspired by tuna which is a pelagic fish whose locomotion is highly efficient [10] (bear in mind that Bandyopadhyay [11] believes that the efficiency of biomimetic swimming robot is not higher than screw propeller robots but animals do show superior manoeuvrability in swimming). However, the efficiency of locomotion of tuna-mimetic robots is not thoroughly investigated. Hence, the authors have developed a fish robot that is inspired by a tuna in order to study its cruising efficiency. This paper presents the steps of developing the tuna-mimetic robot in brief including design, modeling, and fabrication and also discusses the swimming performance of the robot in detail. The paper is organized as follows. Next section focuses on the design criteria of the fish robot. In Section 3, the robot design is introduced. In Section 4, the fabrication process is the center of attention including how the fish is fabricated with which material. Section 5 analyzes the swimming
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