ロボットを用いて探る甲殻類の遊泳肢間協調メカニズム

抄録

For underwater exploration in resource survey and ecological studies, bioinspired robots are recently gathering attention due to their maneuverability and quietness in locomotion. Although most of developed biomimetic underwater robots have employed undulatory locomotion or fin and flipper locomotion like fish and sea turtle, very few studies have investigated a swimming robot like crustaceans. Crustaceans such as shrimps, mantis shrimps ,and giant isopods use their limbs called swimmerets and swim by propagating swimmeret density waves along the body axis. Understanding the coordination mechanism between swimmerets (i.e., inter-swimmeret coordination) in crustaceans swimming will provide a new design principle of agile underwater robots although it is still unclear how crustaceans coordinate their swimmerets via physical interactions between the body and environments. In this paper, we developed a platform, crustaceans-like robot, and investigated locomotor performances of the robot with inter-swimmeret coordination.