Related papers: Modeling Elastic-Body Dynamics of Robotic Fish Usi…

Robotic grasping under uncertainty remains a fundamental challenge due to its uncertain and contact-rich nature. Traditional rigid robotic hands, with limited degrees of freedom and compliance, rely on complex model-based and heavy feedback…

A simple nonholonomic dynamics model is developed as a low-order model for generating undulatory swim-like motions, validated through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The rigid-body-dynamics model generates swimming motion by…

While imitation learning provides us with an efficient toolkit to train robots, learning skills that are robust to environment variations remains a significant challenge. Current approaches address this challenge by relying either on large…

Nature has always inspired scientists and engineers to understand the underlying mechanism leading to optimal design in bio-inspired dynamics. This study presents a computational framework for optimizing undulatory swimming profiles using a…

Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…

Fish use their lateral lines to sense flows and pressure gradients, enabling them to detect nearby objects and organisms. Towards replicating this capability, we demonstrated successful leader-follower formation swimming using flow pressure…

Robotic fish is one of the most promising directions of the new generation of underwater vehicles. Traditional biomimetic fish often mimic fish joints using tandem components like servos, which leads to increased volume, weight and control…

We present in this fluid dynamics video a novel experimental setup with self-propelled swimmers on a free surface. The swimmers, modeled as flexible thin filaments, are subjected to external electromagnetic forcing driving a propagating…

Autonomous ocean-exploring vehicles have begun to take advantage of onboard sensor measurements of water properties such as salinity and temperature to locate oceanic features in real time. Such targeted sampling strategies enable more…

Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…

Collective motion in animal groups emerges from the interplay between individual variability and social coordination, yet connecting these scales quantitatively has remained a major challenge.Using high-resolution trajectories of schooling…

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…

This study investigates a method to guide and control fish schools using virtual fish trained with reinforcement learning. We utilize 2D virtual fish displayed on a screen to overcome technical challenges such as durability and movement…

We present a novel framework for rigid body dynamics in ambient media, such as air or water, enabling accurate motion prediction of objects without requiring computational fluid dynamics simulations. Our method computes the added mass of…

Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…

The deployment of autonomous navigation systems on ships necessitates accurate motion prediction models tailored to individual vessels. Traditional physics-based models, while grounded in hydrodynamic principles, often fail to account for…

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…

We introduce SoftMimic, a framework for learning compliant whole-body control policies for humanoid robots from example motions. Imitating human motions with reinforcement learning allows humanoids to quickly learn new skills, but existing…

An asymmetric two-link robot supported atop a flat platform by wheels that roll and pivot freely, but do not slip laterally, will develop forward momentum if the joint between the links is actuated internally. In particular, oscillations in…

We present numerical simulations of simplified models for swimming organisms or robots, using chordwise flexible elastic plates. We focus on the tip vortices originating from three-dimensional effects due to the finite span of the plate.…