Abylaikhan Mukhamejanov

Abylaikhan Mukhamejanov

Mechanical Engineering Student at Lehigh University ’27

Projects › Research · robotics

TunaBot Leader–Follower Experiments

Two robotic fish, one water channel.

TunaBot Leader–Follower Experiments
My role
Undergraduate researcher — experiments and platform build
When
2025 – present
Where
Unsteady Flow Interactions Lab, Lehigh University
Tools
Arduino · MATLAB/Simulink · NI DAQ · PIV flow imaging · air-bearing platform

The lab’s two TunaBot robotic fish swim one behind the other in the water channel, each on its own carriage so we can set the spacing and the timing between their tail beats precisely. The carriages ride on air bearings, so there is no friction and each fish is free to move back and forth with the flow. It’s the actively swimming version of the question I worked on at Harvard: how does a follower use the wake of the fish in front? The spacings and timings we test are the sweet-spot settings that came out of the Harvard experiments.

What I did

  • Ran both robots through Arduino with MATLAB/Simulink and an NI DAQ keeping the control and the measurements in sync, including trials with the tails beating in phase and out of phase.
  • Captured the wake between the two fish with PIV and processed the flow fields in MATLAB.
  • Helped build and calibrate the new wire-free air-bearing platform the carriages ride on — aligning the rails, cleaning the bearings, and dialing in the accuracy a nearly frictionless platform needs.
TunaBot robotic fish in the water channel
TunaBot in the channel.
CAD of two carriages above the water channel
Two independent carriages above the channel.
CAD of a TunaBot carriage with motor and controller stack
Each carriage has its own motor, controller and computer.

How it turned out

Wake flow fields between leader and follower at the Harvard sweet-spot settings and across the different timings, now with both fish actively swimming — all feeding the same Navy-funded research program as the Harvard work.