Robotic Models for Studying Undulatory Locomotion in Fishes
By George V. Lauder, J. Lim, Ryan M. Shelton, Charles Witt, E. Anderson, James L. Tangorra. 2011
118 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Many fish swim using body undulations to generate thrust and maneuver in threedimensions.Thepatternofbodybendingduringsteadyrectilinearlocomotion has similar general characteristics in many fishes and involves a wave of increasing amplitude passing from the head region toward the tail. While great progress has been made in understanding the mechanics of undulatory propulsion in fishes, the inability to control and precisely alter individual parameters such as oscillation frequency, body shape, and body stiffness, and the difficulty of measuring forces on freely swimming fishes have greatly hampered our ability to understand the fundamental mechanics of the undulatory mode of locomotion in aquatic systems. In this paper, we present the use of a robotic flapping foil apparatus that allows these parameters to be individually altered and forces measured on self-propelling flapping flexible foils that produce a wave-like motion very similar to that of freely swimming fishes. We use this robotic device to explore the effects of changing swimming speed, foil length, and foil-trailing edge shape on locomotor hydrodynamics, the cost of transport, and the shape of the undulating foil during locomotion. We also examine the passive swimming capabilities of a freshly dead fish body. Finally, wemodel fin-fininteractionsin fishesusingdual-flappingfoilsandshowthatthrust can be enhanced under correct conditions of foil phasing and spacing as a result of the downstream foil making use of vortical energy released by the upstream foil.
Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Ocean Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d5f58a63ad5d55af6ec5f09503ef30210ba0422d
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Aerospace Engineering
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
In Ocean Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Undulatory and oscillatory swimming (2019, background): “Lauder et al. (2011) isolated the effects of trailing edge shape for highly flexible panels of very low aspect ratio (0.194 6 A 6 0.340) akin to eel-like swimmers, and found experimentally that the trailing edge could be manipulated to improve the panel self-propelled swimming speed.”