Robots that may swim underwater are nothing new. For occasion, Carnegie Mellon fitted its earlier this yr to provide it aquatic capabilities. But few can accomplish that with the grace, velocity and effortlessness of a real-life fish. And it’s not that scientists have prevented making an attempt to create a robotic that may just do that, however the precise means fish swim sooner or slower is one thing that has proved elusive.

Marine biologists have recognized for some time that the key lies someplace in the way in which they’ll alter the rigidity of their tails. The drawback is that it’s troublesome to measure that whereas a fish swims. However, utilizing a mixture of fluid dynamics and biomechanics, say they’ve derived a system that not solely offers a solution to that query but additionally permits a robotic with a specifically designed tail to be practically pretty much as good as its pure counterpart at dashing up and slowing down in water.

When they utilized the system to a tuna-like robotic they constructed, they discovered it might swim at a larger number of speeds utilizing nearly half as a lot vitality as one with a fixed-stiffness tail. If you’re a bike owner, you’ll love this analogy. “Having one tail stiffness is like having one gear ratio on a bike,” Dan Quinn, one of many co-authors of the research, informed . “You’d only be efficient at one speed. It would be like biking through San Francisco with a fixed-gear bike; you’d be exhausted after just a few blocks.”

With a tuna-sized machine beneath their belt, the University of Virginia staff plans to scale their tail know-how to be used on each greater and smaller robots. They’re additionally growing one which undulates like a stingray. Their work might at some point result in a category of drones that may shortly journey to a distant location after which decelerate to analyze the world. Like an aquatic snakebot, that is one thing the Navy might use to examine their ships for harm.