Underwater vehicles are typically designed to have a single cruise speed, and they’re often inefficient at other speeds. The technology is rudimentary compared to the way fish swim, but researchers believe they have discovered a way of making underwater vehicles travel fast through miles of ocean, then slow down to map a narrow coral reef, or speed to the site of an oil spill then throttle back to take careful measurements.
Researchers at the University of Virginia’s (UVA) School of Engineering & Applied Science have developed a strategy for enabling these kinds of multispeed missions. They have shown a simple way to implement this strategy in robots that they believe could inform the design of future underwater vehicles.
When designing swimming robots, a question that keeps coming up is how stiff the piece that propels the robots through the water should be. This challenge emerges frequently, because the same stiffness that works well in some situations...