Field Testing of Biohybrid Robotic Jellyfish to Demonstrate Enhanced Swimming Speeds

Abstract

Biohybrid robotic designs incorporating live animals and self-contained microelectronic systems can leverage the animals’ own metabolism to reduce power constraints and act as natural chassis and actuators with damage tolerance. Previous work established that biohybrid robotic jellyfish can exhibit enhanced speeds up to 2.8 times their baseline behavior in laboratory environments. However, it remains unknown if the results could be applied in natural, dynamic ocean environments and what factors can contribute to large animal variability. Deploying this system in the coastal waters of Massachusetts, we validate and extend prior laboratory work by demonstrating increases in jellyfish swimming speeds up to 2.3 times greater than their baseline, with absolute swimming speeds up to 6.6 ± 0.3 cm s−1. These experimental swimming speeds are predicted using a hydrodynamic model with morphological and time-dependent input parameters obtained from field experiment videos. The theoretical model can provide a basis to choose specific jellyfish with desirable traits to maximize enhancements from robotic manipulation. With future work to increase maneuverability and incorporate sensors, biohybrid robotic jellyfish can potentially be used to track environmental changes in applications for ocean monitoring.

Biosyncretic Robots Actuated by Living Materials

“…Moreover, the integration of microelectronic devices and organisms for manual enhancement or control is a promising approach to constructing biosyncretic robots. [111] Biosyncretic robots have been proposed based on various organisms, including jellyfish, [14,112,113] sea turtles, [114,115] locusts, [116,117] and beetles. [118][119][120][121] For example, Xu et al [112] embedded low-power microelectronic devices into living jellyfish to stimulate them to swim at a higher frequency than normal, significantly increasing their propulsive force and nearly tripling their swimming speed.…”

“…Moreover, the integration of microelectronic devices and organisms for manual enhancement or control is a promising approach to constructing biosyncretic robots. [ 111 ] Biosyncretic robots have been proposed based on various organisms, including jellyfish, [ 14,112,113 ] sea turtles, [ 114,115 ] locusts, [ 116,117 ] and beetles. [ 118–121 ] For example, Xu et al.…”

“…Furthermore, biosyncretic robots based on aquatic organisms, such as jellyfish, show promise for marine environmental monitoring and exploration. [14,111]…”

“…Reproduced under the term of CC‐BY license. [ 14 ] Copyright 2020, The Authors, published by MDPI. h) Biosyncretic robots actuated by neutrophils.…”

A distributed control method for flexible robotic fish based on PDE

“…Although the effect of control using the multi-DOF linkage model seems sufficient, robotic fish are still expected to swim like real fish. Luckily, there is an increasing number of studies on flexible systems [28][29][30][31]. A typical feature of a flexible system is that its mathematical model is described by partial differential equations.…”