Paddle-typed propulsion mechanism based on shrimp’s swimming method

Abstract

When shrimp walk and swim, they use their swimming legs, as called abdominal limbs, under the abdomen as well as the walking legs called chest legs located at the front of the body to generate thrust. Based on the lessons from the shrimp’s swimming method, this paper introduces a novel paddle-typed propulsion mechanism. Moreover, a shrimp-like prototype realizing the propulsion mechanism is fabricated. Practically, the prototype is composed of a microcontroller, eight motors and motor driver, and eight paddles. The outer shell is manufactured by using polylactic acid resin. Specifically, the paddles are evenly installed at both sides where one side consists of a pair of four paddles. To evaluate the effectiveness of thrust generation by paddle-typed propulsion mechanism and to investigate the thrust relation between movement-timing lags of paddles and propulsion speed, several experiments were performed and their experimental results are presented in this paper. Details on this prototype and several video clips for its experimental scenes are introduced in our presentation.