Hydrodynamic interactions among fish swimming in a school can dramatically reduce the school's collective drag. This drag reduction has been documented experimentally, but the interactions responsible are not fully understood. This problem is of basic scientific interest, but it is also of engineering interest. Biomimetic underwater vehicles are being developed within the robotics community to exploit performance advantages enjoyed by marine animals; the concurrent deployment of schools of underwater vehicles for distributed environmental sensing or military reconnaissance is a common objective.
In order to derive energy efficiency through fluid-structure interactions, particularly in the context of schooling, practical underwater vehicles will need to employ feedback systems incorporating distributed flow sensor data into motion control algorithms. No such systems exist, but novel flow sensors comprising micromachined hair cells provide a platform for their development.
This project will produce analytical and computational models illuminating the dynamics of schooling, advancing methods from the field of geometric mechanics to enable the analysis of both the energetics and the stability of coupled swimming. A robotic prototype will be developed with integrated biomimetic sensing and actuation, and control methods will be derived for this system to demonstrate energy-efficient wake drafting and vortex-assisted turning, two essential components of schooling locomotion.
