Boston Engineering has posted video on the company’s YouTube page of its Ghost Swimmer autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) swimming in a pool, looking like a tuna.
The biomimetic Ghost Swimmer, which imitates the motion of a bluefin tuna, first appeared in MHT as the RoboTuna. The Ghost Swimmer was developed with about $100,000 in STTR grants.
The Waltham-based R&D engineering firm has been busy lately — in June, Boston Engineering won a $100,000 SBIR grant to develop a version of the AUV to inspect the hulls of oil tankers. Around the same time, the company brought in $70,000 in a Phase 1 SBIR grant to work on giving landlocked reconnaissance robots the ability to open doors.
At the end of July, the company got a $70,000 SBIR grant to develop a robotic platform to catch, service, refuel and relaunch unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Incidentally, whoever came up with the UAV and AUV acronyms either didn’t see the kind-of-similar-but-totally-opposite technologies gaining steam at about the same time, or hates me.


