MEAM Seminar: “Metachronal Propulsion from Biology to Engineering: Lessons from Crustaceans and their Robotic Counterparts”
April 14 at 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM
The talk will focus on my lab’s research program at the interface of crustacean biomechanics and bio-inspired robotics. I will begin by introducing metachronal propulsion within the wider landscape of aquatic locomotion strategies, highlighting its taxonomic breadth and the gap in its translation to engineered systems. I will then present new, unpublished data from a comprehensive cross-scale survey of metachronal swimming kinematics in live animals, demonstrating that metachronal coordination is effective across a remarkably wide range of body sizes and Reynolds numbers. The presentation will walk through the development of the Pleobot platform, from biological measurements (μ-CT morphology, high-speed videography, velocimetry measurements) through robot design and fabrication, and present key findings enabled by our robotic approach: the discovery of a leading-edge suction mechanism contributing to lift, and the role of appendage flexibility and coalescence in drag reduction. I will then introduce Nereus and the transition from appendage-level studies to a free-swimming integrated robot. The presentation will close with a brief discussion on how swarm-capable metachronal robots, inspired by krill aggregations, could enable distributed sensing in complex marine environments.
Monica Martinez Wilhelmus
Thomas J. and Alice M. Tisch Assistant Professor of Engineering, Brown University
Dr. Monica Martinez Wilhelmus is the Thomas J. and Alice M. Tisch Assistant Professor of Engineering at Brown University. She received her undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in 2010 and her M.S. (2012) and Ph.D. (2016) degrees, both in Mechanical Engineering, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 2016, she held a postdoctoral scholar position to work on a collaborative project between the Ocean Science group at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL) and the Environmental Science and Engineering department at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Before joining Brown, she was an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) and an affiliated scientist at NASA JPL. Her research combines experimental techniques and algorithm development to understand transport phenomena within the intersection of biology, oceanography, and fluid mechanics. Prof. Wilhelmus is the recipient of the 2024 Young Investigator Program (YIP) Office of Naval Research (ONR) Award.