Title
Design, Modeling And Testing Of A Flagellum-Inspired Soft Underwater Propeller Exploiting Passive Elasticity
Abstract
Flagellated micro-organism are regarded as excellent swimmers within their size scales. This, along with the simplicity of their actuation and the richness of their dynamics makes them a valuable source of inspiration to design continuum, self-propelled underwater robots. Here we introduce a soft, flagellum-inspired system which exploits the compliance of its own body to passively attain a range of geometrical configurations from the interaction with the surrounding fluid. The spontaneous formation of stable helical waves along the length of the flagellum is responsible for the generation of positive net thrust. We investigate the relationship between actuation frequency and material elasticity in determining the steady-state configuration of the system and its thrust output. This is ultimately used to perform a parameter identification procedure of an elastodynamic model aimed at investigating the scaling laws in the propulsion of flagellated robots.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967700
2019 IEEE/RSJ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INTELLIGENT ROBOTS AND SYSTEMS (IROS)
Field
DocType
ISSN
Propulsion,Propeller,Computer science,Flagellum,Control engineering,Acoustics,Robot,Elasticity (economics),Thrust,Design modeling,Underwater
Conference
2153-0858
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
9