State Key Laboratory of Turbulence and Complex Systems, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, People's Republic of China.
Bioinspir Biomim. 2019 Aug 16;14(5):056011. doi: 10.1088/1748-3190/ab336c.
Some fish species communicate electrically (termed electrocommunication) in turbid waters where other communication modalities fail. Inspired by this biological phenomenon, we have developed an artificial electrocommunication system for underwater robots (Wang et al 2017 Bioinspir. Biomimetics 12 036002). Due to the complex terrain of the ocean, electrocommunication could be affected by potential obstacles. In this paper, we investigate the obstacle effects on electrocommunication in a quasi-two-dimensional water environment. We first employ Fresnel zone theory to theoretically analyze the obstacle effects on electrocommunication. We then simplify the ocean terrain into 32 types of obstacles according to their material, relative location, geometry, and size, and use ANSYS Maxwell to simulate the effect of these obstacles on electrocommunication. We fabricate the same types of obstacles as in the simulation, and further conduct electrocommunication experiments with these obstacles in a swimming pool. Both the simulations and experiments show that the material, relative location, geometry, and size of the obstacles all affect the electrocommunication to varying degrees. Finally, we demonstrate that it is possible to identify and detect underwater objects based on the obtained obstacle effects, indicating that electrocommunication could be a new viable method for underwater object detection.
一些鱼类物种在浑浊的水中通过电通讯（称为电通信），而其他通讯方式则无法在这种环境下工作。受此生物现象启发，我们已经开发出一种用于水下机器人的人工电通信系统（Wang 等人，2017 年，《生物灵感与仿生学》，12，036002）。由于海洋的复杂地形，电通信可能会受到潜在障碍物的影响。在本文中，我们研究了准二维水环境中障碍物对电通信的影响。我们首先利用菲涅耳区理论对障碍物对电通信的影响进行理论分析。然后，我们根据障碍物的材料、相对位置、几何形状和大小将海洋地形简化为 32 种障碍物类型，并使用 ANSYS Maxwell 模拟这些障碍物对电通信的影响。我们制造了与模拟中相同类型的障碍物，并在游泳池中进一步进行了带有这些障碍物的电通信实验。模拟和实验都表明，障碍物的材料、相对位置、几何形状和大小都在不同程度上影响电通信。最后，我们证明了基于所获得的障碍物效应来识别和检测水下物体是可能的，这表明电通信可能成为水下物体检测的一种新的可行方法。
