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Motor-Free, Transparent Eel Robot Swims Silently Underwater

University of California  engineers have created an eel-like robot that can swim silently in salt water without an electric motor. The foot-long robot uses artificial muscles filled with water to propel itself. The virtually transparent bot is connected to an electronics board that remains on the surface. One key innovation was using the salt water in which the robot swims to help generate the electrical forces that propel it.

Topics:
Automation Electronics & Computers Motion Control Power Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 [Music] it's really hard to sneak up on a fish especially if you're a robot when a lot of people are studying fish underwater yeah they use an ROV which is a remotely operated vehicle and these things look like a big submarine with propellers on it and so the trouble is that propellers make a lot of noise and so you might scare off the fish before you get close

    00:00:35 enough to be able to study it or take a picture of it and also these these robots are made out of big rigid materials and so if it bumps into something fragile like a coral reef you might damage either the coral reef or the fish and so what I'm working on is a soft robotic fish so that way if it bounces into something it won't hurt it and it can move silently through the

    00:00:55 water so away we can actually study something before we spook it off it's maybe a foot long and it's made out of artificial muscles which is the focus of my research and so I put artificial muscles into this eel to get it to undulate and actually swim through the water right now we're just at the stage of getting it to work and swim like a fish

    00:01:17 and so that's taken us a long time and we're finally to that point where it kind of swims like a fish what's really neat about is it's transparent and so one of the concerns is how do you blend into the environment so that way you don't don't scare the fish it uses what they call passive camouflage and so you don't have to paint it like a coral reef ahead of time it just automatically

    00:01:38 blends into the environment because you can see through it and because it uses electricity to make it move it's completely silent so instead of propellers for movement it has this completely silent wiggling motion so it can sneak through the water