Fishing Ideas

We will have to try some fishing with our robot boat at some point.  I am collecting a few ideas here and will update over time.  Feel free to comment with more.

To start with we could just have it tow a short line with bait and hook.  To start we could just send it out for a fixed time.  But eventually we would like it to be able to tell when it caught a fish.   Could set it up so a struggling fish on the line made a bell ring and use the phone's audio input to detect this.  Can also use the gyro/tilt/acceleration sensors on the phone to tell when a fish is fighting.  The boat has such a gentle motion in the water that any sudden movement is probably from fish.  The phone has a proximity sensor which can detect when something is within 8 cm of the top-front of the phone.  We could attach some duct tape to the poll such that if a fish pulled on the poll and bent it down the duct tape would go in front of the phone.  Also the boat will not be able to go as fast when fighting a fish and could even go backward while thrusting forward, both of which are detectable since the phone has GPS.   With some combination of these we should be able to get a reasonably reliable "caught a fish" detector, at least for large fish.  Small ones we could leave on as new improved bait.

Can also put an electric reel and small pole on the boat as some RC fishing boats have done.  There are even electric reels with bluetooth control, so our phone could control them, though this looks a bit bit for our quadmaran-5.  Next model could handle it.

You can get bluetooth fishfinders.  So our software could see where the fish are and keep on top of them.

There are bait boats that put some bait into the water.  We could do this as well.

You can have the boat pull the end of a line from a regular fishing poll on shore with something that lets go when the fish pulls.   We could buy this or make something like it with a rubber band holding a loop in the fishing line.

We could have the boat pull a long line of many fishing hooks out far into the ocean.  Maybe a half mile or mile.   Then hold the end in position for some time, maybe a half hour, then we could pull the line back in from shore.   This would be a lot like kite fishing but not needing wind, with better  control over where the end of the line went, and not having to pull so hard when it was time to pull the line in.

We will be working on the ability to have the boat dock with another boat using an electromagnet.   So one idea is to dock with a buoy above a trap and pull up the trap.  We could make a small trap.  Could also have it send a picture to shore so we could see if there was fish in the trap before it brought it in.  Or software could figure out if there were fish.

I could even imagine a robot boat using a net to catch fish but probably our Quadmaran-5 is too small for this.  Might try something with later larger models.