It's an aquatic version of follow the leader. Dr.Manrizio Porfiri of NYU's Polytechnic Institute has combined his love for mathematics and animals to invent a robot that he says would one day be able to lead schools of fish away from danger.

Porfiri says the hardest part of his research has been to find out what the qualities of a leader are through the eyes of fish. But he thinks as is the case with most animals, it basically comes down to sex.

"If you take out a propeller and you put it into the water, it may remain as fast as the fish but the fish may not like it. If you can make something that swim like a fish, the fish may perceive it as a mate even if it looks different. "

Porfiri's team is developing a prototype and testing it out with small schools of fish in his lab. They are fine tuning the robot to mimic the actions of a leader, programming it to swim fast and erratically to gain attention, the goal, infiltrate the school and take it over.

"So through mathematics we should be able to gain an understanding of how many robotic fish are needed for drive a group of fish over certain size, and knows them, we can coordinate these fish, so we can have these multi-robotic fish that interact with each other. "

Porfiri says he wants to programme his robot fish to work autonomously without human control. He envisions his robot fish acting like sheep-dogs under water, keeping schools of fish out of danger areas like the oil polluted waters of the Gulf of Mexico, or protecting them from hydro-electric turbines.

"Guide a group of fish from a region which is risky, there is a pollutant you want to drive them somewhere else. There is a migration that you don't like to be somewhere because it's in a 3M bad area, drive them somewhere else. There is power plant and you want to bypass the power plant, it could be risky, the fish may die sucking to the turbines, so how about making a guiding system, a bypass system that uses these robots."

Eventually Porfiri says he wants to upgrade his robot fish and fit them with processors and sensors giving them the ability, not just to lead the school but to learn how to interact with other creatures underwater.

Ben Gruber Reuters.