Abstract
This paper considers aquatic swimming of a pedundulatory bio-robotic system, inspired by the outstanding aquatic and terrestrial locomotion capabilities of the polychaete annelid marine worms. The robot employs lateral undulations of its elongated body, augmented by the oscillation of active lateral appendages (parapodia), to propel itself. The efficient propulsion and terrain adaptability of such robots on unstructured terrestrial substrates have been demonstrated in previous work. Here, we explore gait generation for underwater propulsion by direct (tail-to-head) lateral body waves, either alone (undulatory modes) or combined with appropriately coordinated parapodial motion (pedundulatory modes). A three-segment compliant-body robotic prototype is used, whose body was fabricated by molding polyurethane elastomers. This robot was tested in a laboratory water tank, to demonstrate the advantage gained from the exploitation of both tail-to-head body undulations and parapodia for underwater swimming. The forward speed may more than double and the propulsive force may increase ten-fold, compared to the case where only undulations are used.
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Notes
- 1.
A supplementary video with footage from these experiments can be downloaded from http://tinyurl.com/LM18-forth.
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Acknowledgement
This work was supported in part by the project “Advanced Research Activities in Biomedical & Agroalimentary Technologies” (MIS 5002469) implemented under the “Action for the Strategic Development on the Research & Technological Sector”, funded by the Operational Programme “Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship & Innovation” (NSRF 2014–2020), co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Regional Development Fund).
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Tsakiris, D.P., Evdaimon, T., Papadakis, E. (2018). Aquatic Swimming of a Multi-functional Pedundulatory Bio-Robotic Locomotor. In: Vouloutsi , V., et al. Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems. Living Machines 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10928. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95972-6_53
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