Highly agile flat swimming robot

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, highly maneuverable, untethered centimeter-scale swimming robot with soft fins, capable of navigating unstructured water environments for environmental monitoring and aquaculture applications.

Contribution

The work presents a novel soft-fin design enabling high-speed, agile, autonomous swimming in complex environments, advancing underwater robotic mobility.

Findings

Achieves 5.1 cm/s translation speed and 195°/s rotation.

Can navigate narrow spaces and push heavy objects.

Operates autonomously in unstructured water environments.

Abstract

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, and debris. We report a fast (5.1 cm/s translation and 195 {\deg}/s rotation), centimeter-scale swimming robot with high maneuverability and autonomous untethered operation. Locomotion is enabled by a pair of soft, millimeter-thin, undulating pectoral fins, in which traveling waves are electrically excited to generate propulsion. The robots navigate through narrow spaces, through grassy plants, and push objects weighing over 16x their body weight. Such robots can allow distributed environmental monitoring as well as continuous measurement of plant and water parameters for aqua-farming.