身体と環境の力学カップリングに基づくフラッピング型水中ロボット

抄録

Underwater organisms and underwater environment interact together to provide propulsion. This study focuses on how the soft and lean movements of underwater organisms are achieved. For supple motion, it is expected that the back-drivability in actuators contributes to induce natural movement to the drive mechanism of the underwater robot. We perspective that by increasing the back-drivability in the underwater robot, it could be more susceptible to external forces from the environment, and that it could display swimming due to the interaction between its body and the environment. To investigate this, in this study, we performed hardware experiments showed that the underwater robot behaved by changing its driving frequency depending on the magnitude of the environmental reaction force. Since the movements of multiple flapping mechanisms influenced each other, it is suggested that propulsion is based on a physical coupling between the body and the environment.