Pen-drawing is an intuitive, convenient, and creative fabrication method for delivering emergent and adaptive design to real devices. To demonstrate the application of pen-drawing to robot construction, we developed pen-drawn Marangoni swimmers that ...
Up to now bio-inspired fish-mimicking robots fail when competing with the swimming performance of real fish. While tail motion has been studied extensively, the influence of the head motion is still not fully understood and its active control is chal...
Anguilliform swimmers, like eels or lampreys, are highly efficient swimmers. Key to understanding their performances is the relationship between the body's kinematics and resulting swimming speed and efficiency. But, we cannot prescribe kinematics to...
Quantitative ethology requires an accurate estimation of an organism's postural dynamics in three dimensions plus time. Technological progress over the last decade has made animal pose estimation in challenging scenarios possible with unprecedented d...
The control of movement in living organisms represents a fundamental task that the brain has evolved to solve. One crucial aspect is how the nervous system organizes the transformation of sensory information into motor commands. These commands lead t...
Small-scale magnetic soft-bodied robots can be designed to operate based on different locomotion modes to navigate and function inside unstructured, confined and varying environments. These soft millirobots may be useful for medical applications wher...
In early 2016, we had the opportunity to test a pair of sprawling posture robots, one designed to mimic a crocodile and another designed to mimic a monitor lizard, along the banks of the Nile River in Uganda, Africa. These robots were developed uniqu...
Fish coordinate the motion of their fins and body to create the time-varying forces required for swimming and agile maneuvers. To effectively adapt this biological strategy for underwater robots, it is necessary to understand how the location and coo...
Soft underwater swimming robots actuated by smart materials have unique advantages in exploring the ocean, such as low noise, high flexibility, and friendly environment interaction ability. However, most of them typically exhibit limited swimming spe...
In animal and robot swimmers of body and caudal fin (BCF) form, hydrodynamic thrust is mainly produced by their caudal fins, the stiffness of which has profound effects on both thrust and efficiency of swimming. Caudal fin stiffness also affects the ...