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Jellyfish float across the ocean like drones from the sea. Their simple nature makes them a natural muse for robot engineers who build devices capable of sneaking into tight spaces, to check the health of the ocean and possibly explore the human body.
This week, a team from Florida Atlantic University unveiled a new eight-inch-wide robo-jellyfish designed to monitor marine life and difficult underwater habitats. This is not the first attempt to automate any of these 500 million year old creatures. Virginia Tech researchers, for example, have built a massive 170-pound mechanical device that swims with a parachute-like device. A group at Harvard and CalTech designed a tiny experimental jellyfish
made of rat tissue and silicone to understand how the medullary tissues contract and grow like the human heart muscle.
Instead of hard plastic and wires, Florida researchers have used soft components for the body and tentacles. "It's not going to damage delicate ecosystems," says Erik Engeberg, associate professor of ocean engineering and mechanical engineering at FAU. "It can be deployed in sensitive areas like the Great Barrier Reef."
Engeberg and his colleagues have already tested five jellyfish robots – each made with a different hardness rubber, to test its impact on propulsion – on underwater reefs off the south coast of Florida. The researchers built them in the form of the Moon Jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) at the larval stage. Robots can swim against currents like the organisms that inspired them.
"It can move from one side to the other with its tentacles and has some maneuverability in the current of the ocean," says Engberg, an author on a new paper describing the device in the newspaper. Bioinspiration & Biomimicry.
Jellyfish fly with two pumps to inflate the eight tentacles. The pumps create a water circuit that produces a stroke of swimming. When the pumps stop, the water returns to the ocean and the tentacles relax. The pumps are powered by a 3-volt battery powered by a small electronic board that also operates temperature and salinity sensors.
Florida robo-jelly can also cross holes smaller than its size. The team tested some of them in an aquarium and then again in a pool, swimming them in holes cut from a plexiglass sheet. This is only a beginning, but this skill can be useful for exploring seabed crevices, oil rigs or moored oceanographic instruments.
Over the past decade, university labs have developed many types of bio-inspired robots to better explore the ocean. Robo-fish, tuna, octopus, turtles and even a manta ray have all turned around a water tank. Most of them are experimental models that only last for the duration of their grant. Marine sciences still do not attract the money or commercial dollars that exist for UAV technology or space probes.
Yet, researchers say that they learn by building these bio-inspired flexible robots. Some end up as dead ends that are good for a paper or two. According to Kevin Kit Palmer, a professor of bioengineering and applied physics at Harvard, others have been able to develop new methods of drug delivery or tumor research. Palmer's work focuses on building hybrid devices of living tissue and electronic components that could one day be used to replace organs or serve as a test bed for drugs. "Having a robot with a soft arm is advantageous," he said. "You want something to sneak up, pick it up, or get it out, whether you're talking about tumors or bombs."
Engeberg de FAU is also working on new types of prostheses, and sometimes his projects intersect. He said his team is currently working on an improved robot that can go down several hundred feet below the surface and use a sonar to navigate across the sea. You will probably not see any of them during of your next trip to the beach, but the ideas behind these oceanic robots could appear anywhere.
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