A collaboration between the Unsteady Flow Dynamics Lab (UNFoLD) and Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob) of EPFL
Anguilliform swimmers, like eels or lampreys, are highly efficient swimmers. Our research aims to understand their swimming using 1-guilla, an undulatory bio-inspired robot:
We can vary 1-guilla’s kinematic parameters, including joint amplitude, body wavelength, and frequency. We can record the swimming performance and analyse the resulting kinematics:
1guilla’s speed, in terms of stride length (speed/frequency), increases for increasing maximum tail angle, described by the newly proposed specific tail amplitude and reaches a maximum value around the specific tail amplitude of unity.
Efficiency, in terms of the cost of transport, is affected by the whole-body motion. Cost of transport decreases for increasing travelling wave-like kinematics, and lower specific tail amplitudes.