That sounds it emits is eerie. [Link]
The robofish bodies are continuous (i.e., not divided into different segments), flexible and made from soft polymers. This makes them more maneuverable and better able to mimic the swimming motion of real fish, which propel themselves by contracting muscles on either side of their bodies, generating a wave that travels from head to tail.
"Most swimming techniques can be copied by exploiting natural vibrations of soft structures," says Valdivia Y Alvarado.
As part of his doctoral thesis, Valdivia Y Alvarado created a model to calculate the optimal material properties distributions along the robot's body to create a fish with the desired speed and swimming motion. The model, which the researchers initially proposed in the journal Dynamic Systems Measurements and Control (ASME), also takes into account the robot's mass and volume. A more detailed model is described in Valdivia Y Alvarado's thesis and will soon be published along with new applications by the group.
Other researchers, including a team at the University of Essex, have developed new generations of robotic fish using traditional assembly of rigid components to replicate the motions of fish, but the MIT team is the only one using controlled vibrations of flexible bodies to mimic biological locomotion.
"With these polymers, you can specify stiffness in different sections, rather than building a robot with discrete sections," says Youcef-Toumi. "This philosophy can be used for more than just fish" - for example, in robotic prosthetic limbs.
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