The Mechanism for Coordination between Wings and Head in Penguins’ High-speed Swimming

Abstract

Penguins exploit not only their wings but also the head to achieve agile locomotor capabilities, such as rapid turning and acceleration. Although mimetics way of penguins’ swimming would lead to agile underwater robots, it is still unclear how penguins change their locomotor patterns depending on situations. As a first step to understanding the underlying control mechanism, our previous study has reported different wing-head coordination manners between slow and fast swimming speed through behavior observations and kinematic analyses. In the present study, we developed a simple two-dimensional physical simulator and evaluated the relationship between wing-head coordination patterns and locomotor performance in penguins’ swimming. Simulation results show that the coordination manner between wings and head exhibited by actual penguins achieves the fastest speeds than other coordination manners.