Robokrill: a metachronal robotic swimmer

Metachronal swimming, in which an organism beats adjacent appendages in sequence to propel forward, is a common locomotion mechanism among species of crustaceans that undergo diel vertical migrations (DVM). While recent experimental studies have demonstrated large-scale transport during lab-induced DVM, the hydrodynamic effects of morphology and stroke kinematics within this context are not yet well understood. In this talk, we present a newly developed metachronal robotic swimmer designed to mimic the swimming gait of the Antarctic krill E. superba during forward propulsion with the aim to analyze aspects of metachrony that are challenging to isolate in natural systems. More broadly, our goal is to understand which design parameters can be leveraged to maximize transport. We present preliminary particle image velocimetry measurements during vertical migration of a single swimmer and compare its hydrodynamic signature to flow fields of real organisms presented in the literature. We discuss the feasibility of leveraging this system to engineer new self-propelled robots that maximize transport in a transitional Reynolds regime.