Copebot: Underwater soft robot with copepod-like locomotion
Zhiguo He, Yang Yang, Pengcheng Jiao, Haipeng Wang, Guanzheng Lin,, Thomas P\"ahtz

TL;DR
This paper introduces the 'copebot', an underwater soft robot inspired by copepods, capable of rapid, precise curved jumps with high acceleration, outperforming previous designs and enabling multifunctional biomimetic applications.
Contribution
The paper presents a novel combustion-driven underwater soft robot with an improved thrust transmission unit, achieving significantly higher speed and agility than prior robots, and demonstrates its practical capabilities.
Findings
Achieved an initial acceleration peak of 850 Bodylengths/sec^2.
The copebot is 8 times faster than previous underwater soft robots.
Successfully demonstrated rapid jumping, precise landing, and wireless data transmission.
Abstract
It has been a great challenge to develop robots that are able to perform complex movement patterns with high speed and, simultaneously, high accuracy. Copepods are animals found in freshwater and saltwater habitats that can have extremely fast escape responses when a predator is sensed by performing explosive curved jumps. Here, we present a design and build prototypes of a combustion-driven underwater soft robot, the "copebot", that, like copepods, is able to accurately reach nearby predefined locations in space within a single curved jump. Because of an improved thrust force transmission unit, causing a large initial acceleration peak (850 Bodylength*s-2), the copebot is 8 times faster than previous combustion-driven underwater soft robots, whilst able to perform a complete 360{\deg} rotation during the jump. Thrusts generated by the copebot are tested to quantitatively determine the…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
