Scientists have gotten one step closer to achieving a "flying submarine" that can seamlessly transition from water to air by creating a swimming "RoboBee."
For decades researchers have been trying to create this incredible vehicle, but with little success, Harvard University reported. The largest challenge has been a serious conflict in design requirements: aerial vehicles require large airfoils such as wings or a sail, while underwater vehicles need to minimize their surface area to reduce drag. To solve this problem, a team of research took inspiration from puffins, which use similar flapping motions to propel themselves through both the air and water.
"Through various theoretical, computational and experimental studies, we found that the mechanics of flapping propulsion are actually very similar in air and in water," said Kevin Chen, a graduate student in the Harvard Microrobotics Lab at SEAS. "In both cases, the wing is moving back and forth. The only difference is the speed at which the wing flaps."
For the first time, researchers have created a "flying, swimming, insect-like robot" that could potentially one day be scaled up to be one of these long-sought after vehicle. The current model is a microrobot, smaller than a paperclip that can fly and hover like an insect using nearly invisible wings. It is so small it cannot break through the surface tension of the water, but overcomes this by shutting off its wings and dive-bombing in. This means the RoboBee can easily transition from air to water, but cannot yet move from water to air; in the future the researchers hope to solve this problem.
"What is really exciting about this research is that our analysis of flapping-wing locomotion is not limited to insect-scaled vehicles," Chen said. "From millimeter-scaled insects to meter-scaled fishes and birds, flapping locomotion spans a range of sizes. This strategy has the potential to be adapted to larger aerial-aquatic robotic designs."
The findings were presented at The International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
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