China’s autonomous ‘bionic robot’ fish looks just like the real one, perfect for covert military operations — Robocean BG5 could also be used to track poachers

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• Boyagongdao’s BG-5 robotic golden arowana was one of the most popular attractions at CIFTIS 2026, with staff saying it plans its own route around obstacles

• The 3 kg, 640 mm robot is rated to operate at 5 meters with a top speed of 0.6 m/s, even as endurance, cameras, and payload remain undisclosed

• The design is not new: the BG-5 has been on the company’s site since 2023, and a near-identical arowana robot has been available on their site since 2021

A golden fish doing laps in a small tank at Beijing’s Shougang Park has become one of the most shared clips from this month’s China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS).

The BG-5, a robotic golden arowana made by Boyagongdao Marine Technology Group, effectively serves as an autonomous underwater surveillance drone.

The fish has gone viral on Reddit since, with footage of it reaching the top of r/Damnthatsinteresting since it was first posted.

Not a new invention, but one that has multiple potential uses

The BG-5 has also received coverage (in Chinese) from mainstream Chinese news sources, and while details are scarce on the product page (also in Chinese), its dimensions are listed as 640 by 204 by 90 mm, with 3 kg in tow.

It can travel at a maximum depth of 5 meters and maintains a top speed of 0.6 meters per second or approximately 2.16 km/h. Boyagongdao has not published endurance, payload, or camera specifics, and it has not made any battery-life figures public.

The BG-5 is not new, however; its product page carries images uploaded in August 2023, and the company used the BG-5 to illustrate a World Oceans Day post (in Chinese) in June 2023. The same description appears on a Chinese equipment marketplace listing (in Chinese) dated July 2024.

This isn’t even the company’s first arowana robot: its older Robosea website has product images dating to 2021 and describes the ROBOLAB-GL, a multi-jointed arowana robot with similar use cases, including education, research, entertainment, and marine biology.

It does, however, have an overwhelmingly military aspect, and the company’s background confirms this. Boyagongdao has described itself as a military-civil fusion enterprise , pitching its bionic ROBO-SHARK as a quiet platform with a sound-absorbing shell for concealment and its ROBO-ROV for tasks including underwater combat.

A company representative, Zhang Yu, also said in a 2025 report its bionic technology “can also be used in military and national defense fields.”

The irony here is that it also doubles as an excellent anti-poaching tool: the golden arowana is a color variety of the Asian arowana, a species left endangered by over-harvesting for the aquarium trade, and it has fishing restrictions in place.

A drone-like surveillance fish lookalike could make fishermen even more nervous about attempting to catch any of the endangered species, even as the relatively suspicious exclusion of hardware internals, capabilities, and endurance/performance figures makes one consider that it is aiming to cater to a single primary customer, despite the company’s insistence on multiple use cases for the BG-5.