of the dinosaur . Alvarado said the new generation -- modeled after bass and trout -- cost only a few hundred dollars and have only 10 parts instead of the thousands used in Robotuna . At five to 18 inches , the new fish is much smaller than Robotuna and built from a single , soft polymer . And unlike Robotuna , the fish is able to be released in the oceans . `` Most of the brains , the electronics , are embedded inside , '' said Alvarado , who designed the robofish with fellow MIT engineer Kamal Youcef-Toumi . `` We have built prototypes with the battery inside , but for my experiments , for simplicity . We have a lot of prototypes that are simply tethered . We have a cable that runs out from the body and connects to a power supply . '' The new generation has withstood harsh conditions in the lab , including two years of testing inside tanks filled with tap water , which is corrosive to standard robots , according to Alvarado , who says the Robotuna inspired him to take the technology to the next level . The oil exploration
-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- Schools of robotic fish could one day map the ocean floor , detect pollution or inspect and survey submerged boats or oil and gas pipelines , researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say . MIT researcher Pablo Valdivia Alvarado works in his lab on a robotic fish he co-created . MIT engineers are showing off the latest generation of so-called robofish 15 years after they built the first one . The latest incarnation is sleeker , more streamlined and capable of mimicking the movements of a real fish . And it 's capable of exploring underwater terrain submersibles ca n't , said Pablo Valdivia Alvarado , a mechanical engineer at the school . `` Some of our sponsors were thinking of using them for inspection and surveillance , '' Alvarado said . `` Since these prototypes are very cheap , the idea was to build hundreds -- 200 , 500 -- and then just release them in a bay or at a port , and they would be roaming around taking measurements . '' MIT researchers built their first robotic fish , `` Robotuna , '' in 1994 . But Robotuna has gone the way