Award Winning Fish-Operated Vehicle

OpenSauce 2025 Exhibitor

Awarded Best Design Project, 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. The Raspberry Pi handles fish-tracking and vision processing using the Pi Camera and OpenCV, while the Arduino Mega controls the motors via the motor driver board.

The main goals of the project are:

• Autonomous movement based on camera input

• Communication between Raspberry Pi and Arduino over serial

• Exploration of Mecanum wheel kinematics

• Allow a fish to drive around land autonomously

We have been working on this project for over a year, presenting it at OpenSauce, TN Maker Fest, and at our university.

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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, our submission was accepted for exposition at OpenSauce 2025, an engineering expo in San Mateo, CA and was presented live on-stage with William Osman.

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