The OneFish drones were are first research platform for learning how to effectively build and operate large swarms of aquatic drones.
Swarms have the ability to get exponentially more interesting with increased number of drones in the swarm. The problem is that all costs for building, fielding, and maintaining the swarm also tends to increase exponentially with the number of members of the swarm. OneFish was explicitly designed for testing out a number of automated manufacturing techniques – looking for ways to leverage economy of scale in production of the drones.
At present, the OneFish “swarm” only consists of the three-pictured drones, and an early concept pathfinder. This minimal “swarm” provided enough data to enable us to begin the design construction of the larger TwoFish test swarm, with an updated design for developing swarm control algorithms.
Going forward the OneFish drones are now our platform for testing experimental buoyancy control, and automated drone deployment, collection, and docking work.