Award Winning Fish-Operated Vehicle

OpenSauce 2025 Exhibitor

Awarded Best Design Project, Vanderbilt SyBBURE, Summer 2024

Access the repo here: https://github.com/lauracjung04/FishMobile.

The Wright Brothers made history when they successfully took the first flight, making men not merely terrestrial creatures but also aerial creatures. Together with Phoebe Lin and Ria Mirchandani, we are attempting to make the same leap for our aquatic friends. No longer will fish be relegated to the sea but welcome on the land. Now presenting: THE FISHMOBILE, a fish-operated vehicle.

This project is an experimental robot that uses a Raspberry Pi 3 and an Arduino Mega to navigate with a Mecanum wheel chassis. Most critically, the speed and direction of the chassis is controlled by a fish swimming inside a tank onto of the chassis.

More technically, I developed a Python vision-control system on Raspberry Pi, using OpenCV to estimate fish motion vectors from position changes in a tank and proportionally map them to accelerate the vehicle in the fish’s desired direction. I also integrated ultrasonic sensors and reactive obstacle avoidance to prevent collisions while preserving the fish’s desired motion.

This was our Summer & Fall 2024 project for the SyBBURE Searle Undergraduate Research and Design Program. We beat out 13 other student design teams for 1st place in the end-of-summer design competition. In 2025, we also received acceptance and funding for exposition at OpenSauce 2025, an engineering expo in San Mateo, CA. We were selected by organizer William Osman for an on-stage vehicle demonstration and recognized by a journalist as among the Top 9 “Best of OpenSauce.” We also presented this work at the Tennessee Maker Fest in Fall 2025.

Our design was inspired by previous work out of Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

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