Bioinspiration & biomimetics
Mar 14, 2024
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 ...
Soft robotics
Feb 26, 2024
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...
Bioinspiration & biomimetics
Jan 24, 2024
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...
Nature protocols
Dec 14, 2023
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...
Science robotics
Dec 6, 2023
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...
Physics of life reviews
Nov 7, 2023
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...
PLoS computational biology
Oct 23, 2023
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...
Scientific reports
Sep 12, 2023
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...
Bioinspiration & biomimetics
Aug 29, 2023
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...
Nature communications
Jun 16, 2023
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 ...