MEAM Seminar: “Exploring Jet-Propelled Soft Robots: Design, Experiments, and Theory”

Understanding how marine animals migrate is critical for assessing the impacts of climate change on ocean ecosystems—and yet current Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), with their noisy propellers and rigid hulls, are ill-suited to operate alongside sensitive species. Bio-inspired robots offer a promising alternative by emulating the natural locomotion strategies of fish, cephalopods, and other marine organisms; however, most existing prototypes still fall short of their biological counterparts in speed, and energy efficiency—highlighting a significant performance gap.

In this talk, I will focus on one specific locomotion—jet propulsion—and present our efforts to narrow that gap. First, I will introduce our squid-inspired underwater robotic system and its evolution over the past few years, discussing experiments and theoretical models that show how design and control parameters influence its performance. Next, building on the squid-inspired robot platform, we developed a salp-inspired robot with an additional frontal nozzle; experiments are conducted between the two robots to compare their performances and theoretical explanations are proposed to address the differences. Finally, I will talk about our recently developed swivel-nozzle steering mechanism and describe our plan for achieving controlled two-dimensional navigation.