How Sea Lions Are Inspiring Stealthy, Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
Sea lions may not be the fastest-swimming creature, but their clap-and-glide flipper motion propels them through water while leaving virtually no wake. Underwater propulsion that leaves little traceable wake structure while producing high levels of thrust is a highly desired goal. Megan Leftwich, a George Washington University professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is developing a soft robotic fore-flipper that mimics the animal's movement, hoping it will aid mechanical innovation in the intelligence community.
Transcript
00:00:01 - [Narrator] This Great Big Story was made possible by Shell, make the future. (upbeat music) - [Megan Leftwich] As an engineer, I'm always watching how things swim and sort of thinking about them. The goal is to really be inspired by nature, and take the system that nature has created and understand the physics, and then build that capability into a new vehicle.
00:00:27 (upbeat music) I'm Megan Leftwich, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the George Washington University, and I study sea lions. Most animals swim with their tails or their fluke or whatever's the back of their body. But sea lions use their fore-flippers and clap them into their body to generate a thrust that can propel them through the water at incredible speeds.
00:00:48 This form of swimming is found in almost no other swimming animal. If we could understand how sea lions move, we could design vehicles that could one day stealthy explore shipwrecks, underwater mines or unexplored caves. In 2013, I started to get serious about studying sea lions, and I put together a team of students and other researchers and keepers at the Smithsonian National Zoo. So I thought, well, we could use our modern techniques
00:01:18 and really get into the nitty-gritty of the physics of how these animals swim. And so, we 3D-print three pieces with joints that represent the elbow joint and the wrist joint. And we use different silicone gels to create a soft, robotic flipper. And then what we're able to do is use motors to actually actuate that. So, we can recreate that motion that we got from filming the animals at the zoo
00:01:44 directly from the animals. We, then, put this onto this robotic platform to study, not only, how the animals move but how the animals move the water. And so, understanding the physics of that can allow us to then build some of those capabilities into the engineered vehicles that we have. It's important to take notes from nature when inventing technology because nature has already done so much of the work us.
00:02:11 And so, by looking around, we can definitely broaden our horizons and see solutions that already exist. We're taking nature, which seems to solve problems so elegantly and being inspired by those elegant solutions. And you know, we often say like, nature does that so much better than us and then move on. But maybe if we say, well how do they do it? We could start to increase our own functionality. (upbeat music)