Students Building Robotic Manatee, Whale to Enhance Marine Research

Biomimetic, Remotely Operated Vehicles Will Study Animals Instead of Spooking Them

Madeline Taylor November 14, 2024

Huddled in Florida Tech’s L3Harris Student Design Center, a group of students is working to change how wild manatees are studied. They want to observe through the eyes of marine life, so they’re building the closest thing to it: a robotic manatee.

This mechanical manatee—which students have named Mechanatee—is a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) that will be built just like the real thing, starting with its tail and flippers. Ideally, replicating its anatomy will help create more realistic movement, as opposed to just placing a manatee’s body onto a robot.

The ocean engineering seniors building the ROV hope a group of real manatees will accept it into their herd. If they do, it would provide an incredible opportunity to study the animals and the marine environment in a noninvasive way, said ocean engineering professor Stephen Wood.

Inspired by the West Indian manatee, Mechanatee is designed to be 5 feet long with a 3.5-foot tail and fluke (the paddlelike end of the manatee’s tail). Embedded sensors will measure environmental factors, such as water salinity, temperature and depth, which senior Cannon Bogar said gives helpful context for understanding manatee behavior during surveillance.

Ideally, the ROV will wear a live camera underwater. The team wants to equip Mechanatee with a hydrophone as well, which detects acoustic signals underwater, to record manatees’ sounds.

According to Bogar, that would help in understanding, interpreting and even attempting to replicate manatee “language.”

The build team’s immediate goal, however, is to create a fully functional tail that can operate out of water. Once that is accomplished, they’ll have a stronger foundation for engineering the rest of the body, senior Jackson Clendenin said.

The engineers began developing design ideas during their freshman year. It started as a fun idea to brainstorm after Wood’s class, according to Clendenin. By their junior year, their ideas became a reality. Now, it’s the team’s senior design capstone project.

The Mechanatee project runs parallel to another of Wood’s projects: designing and building a robotic whale. The whale initiative is led by graduate student Haylie Garman, who helped lead the original robotic manatee effort a few years ago. Using similar design concepts, the two robots will be designed to be biomimetic, which means they imitate biological processes found in nature.

Both could eventually be fully immersed in the marine environment, collecting data without interruption.

“We could use the spy robots to get closer to marine life in the wild without spiking their stress level and spooking them,” Garman said.

The Mechanatee team’s main goal for the summer was to create a tail that moves like a manatee’s, primarily focusing on the tail’s biomimetics.

The tail has two motors: one that moves the tail up and down, and another that turns it. With both points of motion, Clendenin said, the tail should move in a wave-like pattern, like a marine mammal swimming. Though the ROV’s bones aren’t an exact replication of an actual manatee’s, its skeleton still closely mimics the animal’s muscles.

Garman’s team is focused on mimicking a whale’s motion by developing a more exact musculature from the inside. Combining the deeper skeletal design with basic mechatronics, her team hopes to create even more realistic movement.

“We’re kind of just using nature’s blueprints, honestly,” Garman said.

With both his undergraduate and graduate students hard at work, Wood is proud of his students’ multiyear dedication to the project and said he’s excited to keep involving students in research as early as freshman year.

“Everybody can come here and actually learn how to do the 3D printing, how to put mechanisms together, how to do the electronics,” Wood said. “Give them the responsibilities … and boy, they’ll do amazing stuff.”

The robotic whale project is led by Haylie Garman, AJ Saad and Wyatt Amarosa. The Mechanatee team is led by Cannon Bogar, Aidan Calenda, Jackson Clendenin, Laura Mace, Eden Stroman and Jacob Warner, who plan to present their ROV in the Northrop Grumman Engineering and Science Student Design Showcase in spring 2025.