Monitoring, sensing, and exploration of over 70% of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water is permitted through the deployment of underwater bioinspired robots without affecting the natural habitat. To create a soft robot actuated with soft polymeric actuators, this paper describes the development of a lightweight jellyfish-inspired swimming robot, which achieves a maximum vertical swimming speed of 7.3 mm/s (0.05 body length/s) and is characterized by a simple design. The robot, named Jelly-Z, utilizes a contraction–expansion mechanism for swimming similar to the motion of a Moon jellyfish. The objective of this paper is to understand the behavior of soft silicone structure actuated by novel self-coiled polymer muscles in an underwater environment by varying stimuli and investigate the associated vortex for swimming like a jellyfish. To better understand the characteristics of this motion, simplified Fluid–structure simulation, and particle image velocimetry (PIV) tests were conducted to study the wake structure from the robot’s bell margin. The thrust generated by the robot was also characterized with a force sensor to ascertain the force and cost of transport (COT) at different input currents. Jelly-Z is the first robot that utilized twisted and coiled polymer fishing line (TCPFL) actuators for articulation of the bell and showed successful swimming operations. Here, a thorough investigation on swimming characteristics in an underwater setting is presented theoretically and experimentally. We found swimming metrics of the robot are comparable with other jellyfish-inspired robots that have utilized different actuation mechanisms, but the actuators used here are scalable and can be made in-house relatively easily, hence paving way for further advancements into the use of these actuators.

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Monitoring, sensing, and exploration of over 70% of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water is permitted through the deployment of underwater bioinspired robots without affecting the surrounding natural habitat. To create a soft robot actuated with soft polymeric actuators, this paper describes the development of a lightweight jellyfish-inspired swimming robot, which achieves a maximum vertical swimming speed of 7.3 mm/s (0.05 body length/s) and is characterized by a simple design. The robot, named Jelly-Z, utilizes a contraction-expansion mechanism for swimming similar to the motion of a Moon jellyfish. To better understand the characteristics of this motion, FSI flow simulation, and particle image velocimetry (PIV) tests were conducted to study the wake structure from the robot’s bell margin. The thrust generated by the robot was also characterized with a force sensor to ascertain the force and cost of transport (COT) at different input currents. Jelly-Z is the first robot that utilized twisted and coiled polymer fishing line (TCPFL) actuators for articulation of the bell and showed successful swimming operations. Here, a thorough investigation on swimming characteristics in an underwater setting is presented theoretically and experimentally. We found swimming metrics of the robot are comparable with other jellyfish-inspired robots that have utilized different actuation mechanisms, but the actuators used here are scalable and can be made in-house relatively easily, hence paving way for further advancements into the use of these actuators.

The aerodynamic performances and flow statistics for a DU(Delft University)-91-W2-250 airfoil with deformable vortex generators (DVG) were experimentally studied in a wind tunnel across various angle of attacks and wind speeds. A high-resolution force sensor was used to measure the time-averaged lift force, while a planar particle image velocimetry system was applied to characterize the mean velocity and vortex shedding over airfoil surface. The results highlighted that, similar to conventional rigid vortex generators (RVG), DVG can effectively enhance lift coefficient after the stall angle of airfoil with clean surface under low incoming winds. However, the deformation of DVGs increased with the growth of wind speed; this suppressed the effectiveness of wake mixing where the aerodynamic performance of DVGs gradually converged to clean surface configurations. The flow measurements demonstrated that deformation of DVG can lead to significant decrease of near-wall flow velocities close to the airfoil trailing edge and generate more dispersed vorticity distributions. To further investigate the linkage between DVG deformation and its wake mixing effectiveness, complementary tomographic particle image velocimetry measurements were conducted. The results indicated that the vorticity strength presented monotonic decay with the bending angle of DVG within both near and intermediate wake regions. The capability of DVGs to passively adjust their bending angle and therefore the airfoil lift coefficients provides a novel approach to reduce aerodynamic load fluctuations for aircraft within unsteady flows.

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