Related papers: Don't be jelly: Exploring effective jellyfish loco…
We present OpenFish: an open source soft robotic fish which is optimized for speed and efficiency. The soft robotic fish uses a combination of an active and passive tail segment to accurately mimic the thunniform swimming mode. Through the…
Jellyfish nerve nets provide insight into the origins of nervous systems, as both their taxonomic position and their evolutionary age imply that jellyfish resemble some of the earliest neuron-bearing, actively-swimming animals. Here we…
We present fluid dynamics videos of the pulsing dynamics and the resulting fluid flow generated by the upside down jellyfish, Cassiopea spp. Medusae of this genus are unusual in that they typically rest upside down on the ocean floor and…
Fish rheotaxis, or alignment into flow currents, results from intertwined sensory, neural and actuation mechanisms, all coupled with hydrodynamics to produce a behavior that is critical for upstream migration and position holding in…
In this paper we study the two dimensional motion of three linked rigid bodies moving through a fluid. The bodies change their orientation relative to each other in a way which mimics the swimming of fish. In contrast to previous…
Swimming cells often have to self-propel through fluids displaying non-Newtonian rheology. While past theoretical work seems to indicate that stresses arising from complex fluids should systematically hinder low-Reynolds number locomotion,…
Metachronal swimming, the sequential beating of limbs with a small phase lag, is observed in many organisms at various scales, but has been studied mostly in the limits of high or low Reynolds numbers. Motivated by the swimming of brine…
We experimentally study a scallop-like swimmer with reciprocally flapping wings in a nearly frictionless, cohesive granular medium consisting of hydrogel spheres. Significant locomotion is found when the swimmer's flapping frequency matches…
Bio-inspired underwater vehicles could yield improved efficiency, maneuverability, and environmental compatibility over conventional propeller-driven underwater vehicles. However, to realize the swimming performance of biology, there is a…
We study a linear inviscid model of a passively flexible swimmer with distributed flexibility, calculating its propulsive performance and optimal distributions of flexibility. The frequencies of actuation and mean stiffness ratios we…
For decades, people have been seeking for fishlike flapping motions that can realize underwater propulsion with low energy cost. Complexity of the nonstationary flow field around the flapping body makes this problem very difficult. In…
Scombrid fishes and tuna are efficient swimmers capable of maximizing performance to escape predators and save energy during long journeys. A key aspect in achieving these goals is the flexibility of the tail, which the fish optimizes…
We study a linear inviscid model of a passively flexible swimmer, calculating its propulsive performance, eigenvalues, and eigenfunctions with an eye towards clarifying the relationship between efficiency and resonance. The frequencies of…
Effective methods of fluid transport vary across scale. A commonly used dimensionless number for quantifying the effective scale of fluid transport is the Reynolds number, Re, which gives the ratio of inertial to viscous forces. What may…
Biological locomotion, observed in the flexible wings of birds and insects, bodies and fins of aquatic mammals and fishes, consists of their ability to morph the wings/fins. The morphing capability holds significance in the abilities of…
We introduce a novel approach to simulate the interaction between fluids and thin elastic solids without any penetration. Our approach is centered around an optimization system augmented with barriers, which aims to find a configuration…
Industry experience indicates that the ability to incrementally expand data centers is essential. However, existing high-bandwidth network designs have rigid structure that interferes with incremental expansion. We present Jellyfish, a…
Limbless crawling is ubiquitous in biology, from cells to organisms. We develop and analyze a model for the dynamics of one-dimensional elastic crawlers, subject to active stress and deformation-dependent friction with the substrate. We…
Depending on multiple parameters, soft robots can exhibit different modes of locomotion that are difficult to model numerically. As a result, improving their performance is complex, especially in small-scale systems characterized by low…
Low Reynolds number swimmers frequently move near boundaries, such as spirochetes moving through porous tissues and sperm navigating the reproductive tract. Furthermore, these microorganisms must often navigate non-Newtonian fluids such as…