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Biomimetic Vortex Propulsion: Toward the New Paradigm of Soft Unmanned Underwater Vehicles
Francesco Giorgio Serchi, Andrea Arienti, and Cecilia Laschi, Senior Member, IEEE
AbstractA soft robot is presented which replicates the ability of cephalopods to travel in the aquatic environment by means of pulsed jet propulsion. In this mode of propulsion, a discontinuous stream of uid is ejected through a nozzle and rolls into a vortex ring. The occurrence of the vortex ring at the nozzle-exit plane has been proven to provide an additional thrust to the one generated by a continuous jet. A number of authors have experimented with vortex thrusting devices in the form of piston-cylinder chambers and oscillating diaphragms. Here, the focus is placed on designing a faithful biomimesis of the structural and functional characteristics of the Octopus vulgaris. To do so, the overall shape of this swimming robot is achieved by moulding a silicone cast of an actual octopus, hence offering a credible replica of both the exterior and interior of an octopus mantle chamber. The activation cycle relies on the cable-driven contraction/release of the elastic chamber, which drives the uid through a siphon-like nozzle and eventually provides the suitable thrust for propelling the robot. The prototype presented herein demonstrates the tness of vortex enhanced propulsion in designing soft unmanned underwater vehicles. Index TermsAutonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), bioinspiration, biorobotics, propulsion, soft robots, thruster, unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs).

I. INTRODUCTION ITH the ever growing importance of offshore technologies and maritime transport, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) have been progressively employed throughout a wider range of applications. Unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) have earned a very positive reputation for their suitability at dealing with complex tasks in poorly accessible, often unsafe environments. Among the great variety of such vehicles, two major classes of UUVs are distinguished, which Krieg and Mohseni [1] identify as the torpedo-like and the box type. To the rst class, longrange, high-speed travelers pertains, while the second family broadly comprehends efcient low-speed maneuvering vehicles. In addition to standard UUVs, a growing fascination for bioinspired technologies has lead, in recent times, to the development

Manuscript received November 15, 2011; revised April 30, 2012 and July 27, 2012; accepted September 11, 2012. Recommended by Guest Editor S. Kim. This work was supported by the European Commission in the frame of the ICTFET OCTOPUS Integrating Project and the CFD-OctoProp project European Reintegration Grant. F. G. Serchi and A. Arienti contributed equally to this work. The authors are with the Research Centre on Sea Technologies and Marine Robotics, Scuola Superiore SantAnna, Pisa 57126, Italy (e-mail: f.serchi@ sssup.it; a.arienti@sssup.it; cecilia.laschi@sssup.it). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TMECH.2012.2220978

of a number of aquatic robots which employ alternative strategies for the locomotion (e.g., [2] and [3]). Among these, a broad range of variants are found in terms of the swimming pattern adopted, as thoroughly accounted for in [4]. These new family of bioinspired robots make use of discrete links of rigid or semirigid materials joint together in such a way to exploit the exibility of the overall structure. In this respect, the design of these robots relies on standard mechanical principles assembled in a somewhat uncommon fashion with the purpose of replicating the functionality of the biological source of inspiration. A totally new and alternative approach to robot design has lately appeared in the form of soft robotics. Despite a rigorous and formal denition of soft robot partially remains a topic of open debate, the basic elements, which the concept of soft robotics stems from, are the intrinsic compliance and hyper-redundancy. Soft robots are manufactured with exible materials which exert minimal resistance to compressive and shearing forces. This property of the constitutive materials allows soft robots to undergo extensive strains, thus making them less prone to damage and to causing harm, as well as making them suitable for an entire new spectrum of applications. An exhaustive treatment on this topic is out of the scope of this paper and the reader is referred to the comprehensive review of [5]. Soft robots have so far acquired only limited credibility, this being due, on one hand, to the complexity of designing soft robots which perform at least as effectively as their hard counterparts and, on the other hand, in not having fully recognized how the benet provided by a soft structure can be exploited to its whole extent. This stands true for the terrestrial as well as for the aquatic environment. However, cephalopods bring evidence that, in water, organisms lacking rigid structures do not appear to suffer any major limitation when compared to organisms with an endo or exoskeleton. Quite the contrary, it occurs that cephalopods manifest outstanding performances in terms of both manipulation and locomotion. The case of cephalopods strongly suggests they might be a fruitful source of inspiration for designing aquatic soft robots. Indeed, active research is currently being dedicated to the development of soft manipulators which resemble the octopus arm [6][8]; however, only a limited effort has been put so far in producing cephalopod-inspired propulsion devices [1], [9][13]. This paper focuses on the development of a completely new type of UUV which faithfully draws inspiration from the swimming technique adopted by cephalopods. The robot presented herein is unique in that it tightly matches the shape of a real octopus vulgaris, is entirely made of exible material (with the exception of one gearmotor), and employs an efcient propulsion mechanism which is very closely reminiscent of that one of cephalopods.

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II. BIOINSPIRED PROPULSION Commercially available UUVs of the box type commonly rely on several thrusters in order to provide localized acceleration for enhanced control. The majority of thrusters found on UUVs are standard propellers. Azimuthal, podded, and ducted propellers are also fairly common in this eld of application. All these, however, suffer from low effectiveness when it comes to operating at few or single rotations of the propeller as it occurs when impulsive, but brief accelerations are required [1]. This represents a signicant drawback which can dramatically limit the controllability of the UUVs in unpredictable, wave or current dominated environments. The latest trend in underwater propulsion for addressing the issue of maneuverability lies in the inspiration from aquatic animals and the strategies they have adopted throughout evolution. Early research has devoted great interest in swimming sh. Lately, a growing attention has been addressed toward the propulsion via the employment of ns (e.g., [14]). Finally, cephalopod-like pulsed jet propulsion has very recently been suggested as an appealing alternative to the other ways of locomotion in water. Pulsed jet propulsion has been broadly investigated either from a biological point of view and from a mostly uid mechanical perspective starting from the early work on cephalopod locomotion by the authors of [15] and [16] and that on laminar vortex rings by the authors of [17][19]. The research in this eld progressed in a fairly discontinuous fashion until a renewed interest arose from the work of the authors in [20][22] who provided evidence of the existence of a universal scaling factor for vortex ring formation. The acknowledgment that optimal formation time and enhanced thrust of the vortex ring coincided [23] has promoted a renovated appeal for the potential exploitation of pulsed jet technology for underwater propulsion. In recent times, the interest in pulsed jet propulsion has fostered a wealth of new research in the uid mechanics of vortex rings [24][27] and cephalopod locomotion [28][31]. Most importantly, a number of underwater vehicles propelled by various kinds of vortex thrusters have been developed and tested [1], [9], [10], [12], [13], [32]. A. Pulsed Jet Propulsion The pulsation cycle in cephalopods is driven by the interplay of the mantle muscle groups. The octopus has longitudinal, radial, and circular muscles, the concurrent contraction of which permits the pressurization and stiffening of the mantle chamber. Differential activation of one group over the others gives rise to changes in the shape of the mantle [33]. Ideally, a pulsation cycle is initiated by the relling of the mantle cavity. This is driven by the expansion of the mantle chamber due to the antagonistic contraction of radial muscles, on one hand, and circular and longitudinal muscles, on the other, along with the incompressibility of the muscular tissue. The diameter of the chamber increases and water is selectively ingested via a pair of valves located underneath the funnel [see Fig. 1(a)]. Inow across the siphon is impaired by the collapse of the siphon itself due to pressure drop inside the nozzle. The ejection of the uid stored inside the mantle cavity occurs at this stage. When the activation of the circular muscles

Fig. 1. Schematic depiction of the pulsation sequence as seen from an external side view of the octopus mantle. (a) Mantle expands and water is ingested through the ingestion valves and, to a minor extent, through the siphon. (b) Mantle contracts and water is expelled through the siphon, generating a structured vortex ring.

is prominent over the others, the diameter of the chamber decreases [33], and a uid slug is expelled through the funnel [see Fig. 1(b)]. During this process, the ingestion valves are sealed, thus forcing the uid to accelerate across the nozzle and, at the same time, avoiding any signicant pressure loss. As the slug of uid reaches the edge of the nozzle, the boundary layer generated inside the wall of the funnel rolls up and gives rise to a vortex ring [20]. Krueger and Gharib [26] bring evidence that pulsed jet mode provides a signicant benet in terms of thrust in comparison to the case of a continuous jet mode. The reason for the enhanced thrust lies in the occurrence of the vortex ring which is responsible for what Krueger [34] refers to as the nozzle-exit overpressure. This additional term appears to participate to the overall thrust with a very remarkable contribution which, for the case of optimal formation time, can be as large as 20% [23], [26]. The existing work on vortex enhanced propulsion suggests that a strong potential lies behind this yet unexplored research eld. Nevertheless, only a limited effort has been made so far in order to thoroughly assess the actual employability of this mean of propulsion. The most remarkable advances in pulsed jet propulsion are presented in the following. B. Existing Vortex Thrusters In recent times, pulsed jet vortex thrusters have been designed and tested on actual prototypes [10], [12], [13], [32], [35]. Mohseni [32] and Krieg and Mohseni [10] developed a diaphragm-driven zero net-mass ux actuator. The expansion and contraction of the diaphragm drives the ingestion and expulsion of uid which produces the vortex ring. Krieg and Mohseni [10] bring evidence that in vortex-driven propulsion, the time required for thrust to reach its steady-state value is signicantly shorter than it is for standard propellers. This strongly

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supports the idea that pulsed jet propulsion could be an extremely valid alternative to propellers for low-speed maneuvering and station-keeping tasks. Moslemi and Krueger [11], [12] developed the self-propelled piston-driven UUV Robosquid. In this case, a piston/cylinder apparatus is implemented along with a set of check valves which guarantee the unidirectionality of the uid through the nozzle in a similar fashion to what is observed in real squids. Finally, Ruiz et al. [13] developed an underwater vehicle driven by a propeller. The device presented by Ruiz et al. [13] can either generate a continuous or a discontinuous jet by the controlled occlusion of the propeller slipstream. A series of tests were performed with the aim of experimentally comparing the vehicle efciency in the case of steady-jet and pulsed-jet modes of propulsion. Results from the experiment of Ruiz et al. show a 40% increase in Froude efciency. The outcome of the experimental research on vortex thruster propelled vehicles demonstrates that pulsed jet propulsion can indeed represent a feasible alternative to standard propeller. In what follows, the recent advancement in vortex enhanced propulsion is applied in the context of soft robotics with the scope of developing a new type of soft unmanned underwater vehicle (SUUV) for which cephalopods represent the perfect source of inspiration. III. SOFT VORTEX THRUSTERS: CONCEPT AND DESIGN The aim of this study is to introduce a new kind of UUV. The novelty of the prototype presented herein lies in its soft nature, hence the denition of soft unmanned underwater vehicle, or SUUV, along with a bioinspired propulsion mechanism. Soft robots promise and have already proved to be suited for providing advantages in a number of ways over standard rigid robots [5], among which the reduced risk of damage and capability to adjust through narrow apertures are only two examples. These advantages could indeed be exploited throughout a wide variety of marine applications. The authors believe that SUUVs could benet from a tremendous asset in comparison to standard UUVs thanks to their reduced weight, their proneness to comply with complex surroundings, and their intrinsic safety when interacting with a diver. These features will provide a remarkable benet in several applications of offshore engineering such as pipeline and ship hull inspection, wreck exploration, sheries and aquaculture survey, and underwater archeology. In addition, recent developments in the design of soft robotic arms (i.e., [6][8], [36]) have anticipated that soft robots will soon benet from manipulation capabilities comparable to those of rigid robots. This suggests that, once equipped with the appropriate manipulators, an SUUV could accomplish difcult endeavors including marine growth removal, damaged propeller cropping, and even underwater welding, which nowadays mainly remain a prerogative of expert divers. In developing this rst prototype, inspiration was drawn from the aquatic animal which better suits the design scope, namely the octopus. The choice of the octopus rather than other cephalopods is motivated by the lack of collagen layers in its mantle thickness [33]. This on one hand makes the octopus a less

impressive sea dweller, as opposed to collagen-endowed squids and cuttlesh [37], but, on the other hand, it makes the octopus the perfect paradigm of softness. As far as the propulsion mechanism is concerned, the authors have managed to achieve a functional synthesis of the swimming routine of cephalopods, hence beneting from the advantage provided by the vortexenhanced pulsed jet propulsion of these animals. This is done by manufacturing a replica of a real mantle of a cephalopod, more precisely an octopus vulgaris, and endow this with an apparatus which imitates the motor functions of these swimming organisms. In addition, since the robot is fashioned according to accurate biomimicry, it could be employed as a test bed for the study of the biological locomotion in octopuses. The design concept presented here represents a rst tentative approach of incorporating the principles of soft robotics into the development of an SUUV and, in this respect, this study provides a new step into what can be referred to as marine soft robotics. A. Mantle Chamber In an effort to conceive a functional replica of a real octopus, the rst step involves the design of a robot which is structurally resemblant to its biological counterpart. This offers the advantage of ensuring that the robot will benet from an efcient hydrodynamic shape suited for performing the compression/expansion unsteady mode of swimming. The similarity, however, should not only account for the exterior of the octopus, but for the inside, as well. Observation of an octopus demonstrates that the interior of the mantle chamber is shaped in such a way to guarantee that the uid is smoothly pushed toward the funnel during compression of the chamber, as schematically portrayed in Fig. 1. This said, the most effective way of producing a faithful replica of the mantle of an octopus is achieved by manufacturing a cast of an actual specimen. A 1.2 kg (wet body weight) octopus vulgaris was acquired from the local market. Because the focus of this study is the mantle alone, the arms were cut off. Liquid polyurethane was poured inside the mantle cavity, holding the mantle with the funnel facing upward. The polyurethane was allowed to creep through the cavities of the mantle and was left to condensate for 40 min. The body of rigid polyurethane within the mantle chamber will be referred to as PU-1 [see Fig. 2(b)]. The ensemble composed of PU-1 and the octopus mantle was then immersed into a container capable of comfortably lodging the whole set with the funnel region still facing upward. An additional amount of liquid polyurethane was poured in the container around the polyurethane-lled octopus mantle. This second stage of casting is performed in two parts. A rst cast is poured up to the level of largest cross section of the mantle. The octopus mantle and PU-1 are initially held in place by means of external hangers and later by the quickly increasing viscosity of the external polyurethane. Once this rst cast has solidied, a lm of silicone is dripped over it. Then, a second cast of polyurethane is poured onto the silicone lm up to the top of the mantle. In this manner, the external body of polyurethane can conveniently be opened to facilitate the extraction of the inner elements. The second cast

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Fig. 3. Mantle chamber as achieved from a CAD processed Magnetic Resonance Imaging of a jelly mould: (a) view from above across the section EF , (b) lateral view across the median section AB , (c) frontal view across the cross section C D .

Fig. 2. Elements composing the polyurethane mould. (a) Block is assembled and lled with silicone. (b) Various pieces obtained throughout the process of casting the original octopus are presented. Element 1 corresponds to PU-1, which is the rst mould of the inside of the octopus, while elements 24 correspond to PU-2, namely the outside of the octopus. The gap in between PU-2 and PU-1 constitutes the actual octopus mantle.

of polyurethane is allowed to solidify. At this stage, the external cast, referred to as PU-2, contains the octopus mantle [see Fig. 2(b)]. This, in turn, encloses the PU-1. The remnants of the octopus, comprising the mantle tissues and internal organs, are removed by opening PU-2. At this stage, PU-1 and PU-2 compose the inside and the outside of the original animal, while the gap in between them represents the actual octopus mantle [see Fig. 2(a)]. A detailed image of the octopus mantle was achieved by performing an MRI of the polyurethane block lled with jelly and CAD processing the MRI data (see Fig. 3). Finally, a total of 280 g of EcoFlex00-30 silicone is poured in the gap between PU-1 and PU-2 and is allowed to polymerize at ambient temperature for 12 h. By extracting the silicone cast from the polyurethane mould, an exact replica of the original octopus mantle is obtained (Fig. 4). The nal silicone cast (see Fig. 4) manifests a number of interesting features. A rst qualitative analysis of the thickness of the mantle wall shows a smooth but appreciable variation across the body [see Fig. 3(b)]. The wall thickness varies from a thin sheet in the ventral region to a more thick-walled layer in the dorsal area. A similar pattern is found along the axial direction, as portrayed in Fig. 3(a). Qualitative tests in fresh water seem to suggest that such a pattern of the wall depth supports the contractile function of the mantle. Indeed, according to this conguration, the silicone mock-up demonstrates a distinctive aptitude for elastic response to inward radial strain. As a result,

Fig. 4. Ecoex00-30 silicone cast of an octopus mantle: (a) frontal view, (b) side view, (c) ventral view, and (d) dorsal view.

these mantle walls are extremely efcient at recalling ambient uid through the apertures and passively sustaining the rell phase. B. Actuation In order to replicate the biological propulsion of cephalopods, it is necessary to mimic the mechanism by which the slug of uid is accelerated through the funnel and eventually gives rise to the vortex ring. In real cephalopods, the driving pressure is generated by the radial compression of the mantle chamber which primarily occurs thanks to the shortening of the circumferential muscles located within the mantle thickness [33]. This is the very essence of the muscular hydrostat, according to which a radial expansion of few millimeters translates into a tenfold compression in volume. A number of viable options have been taken into account for the design of a suitable actuator including electroactive polymers and shape memory alloy.

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TABLE I SPECIFICATIONS FOR THE 56.8:1 GM11A GEARMOTOR

TABLE II SPECIFICATIONS FOR THE 100:1 GM12A GEARMOTOR

Fig. 5. Actuator components and activation sequence. (a) Side view of the silicone mantle and the actuator. The numbers, respectively, refer to 1 the batteries, 2 the PCL structure which joins the batteries to the gearmotor, 3 the gearmotor, 4 the PCL fairlead connected to the main structure, 5 the cables, and 6 the rod adapted onto the shaft of the gearmotor. (b) Cross-sectional view of the mantle at the initial stage of the actuation sequence: the external silicone walls are undeformed and the rod is angled 90 . (c) Same cross section as in (a) during maximum tension on the cables: the rod is angled 90 and the external silicone walls are folded inward.

Fig. 6. Details from the CAD of the actuator components: (a) exploded and (b) assembled view. The numbers refer to the various components as illustrated in the caption of Fig. 5.

However, it is the authors understanding that the existing research on articial muscles does not yet offer reliable solutions for replicating the functionality of the mantle, as discussed in Section II-A. On the other hand, none of the existing vortex thrusters (see Section II-B) are regarded as suitable candidates for implementation into a soft bodied, light-weight robot. All this poses signicant limitation both to the adoption of standard technology and to the design of a suitable actuator for the scope of this study. Given the unsuitability of the available technology to replicate the exact mechanism of isotropic mantle compression, a functional surrogate for the muscular hydrostat is developed. In the current prototype, the compression of the mantle chamber is executed by means of a series of cables tted, at one end, to the exterior of the mantle walls and, at the other end, to a rod located at the center of the mantle cavity. The rod is adapted to the shaft of a gearmotor, the rotation of which cyclically pulls and releases the cables [see Fig. 5(b) and (c)]. Two gearmotors, the Solarbotics GM11A and the GM12A, have been employed for this purpose. Reported motor specications are provided in

Tables I and II. The power source for the gearmotor is supplied by common lithium-ion batteries. These are immersed in the silicone in the same place where the organs are found in the real octopus. The batteries and the gearmotor are the only rigid components of the whole structure. The gearmotor is held approximately at the center of the mantle cavity, kept in place by a polycaprolactone (PCL) mould, see element 2 in Fig. 6(a) and (b). The ribbon-shaped PCL cast wraps around the gearmotor [element 3 in Fig. 6(a)] and reaches out to the batteries, as portrayed in Fig. 5(a). In addition, in order for the cables to be equally pulled regardless of their position, a kind of xed pulley is employed through which the cables are gathered [element 4 in Fig. 6(a)]. The xed pulley is made of PCL and acts as those devices which in the nautical industry are referred to as fairleads. This is placed underneath the rod and it is held in place by an extrusion of the PCL ribbon which joins the battery to the gearmotor [see Fig. 6(a) and (b) for clarication]. The xed pulley allows all the cables to be pulled from the same spot, for the same amount of time, and to the same extent. The actuator drives the contraction, while the resilience of the silicone provides the force which pulls back the cables as they get released by the gearmotor. In this respect, the robot differs from the biological counterpart in the way the mantle walls undergo deformation. In the animals, the deformation of the mantle cavity occurs uniformly over the cross section of the mantle, while

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in the robot, the contraction is performed in a discrete manner at distinct spots over the mantle surface, as dictated by the arrangements of the cables. This implies that the collapse of the mantle chamber in the robot takes place through the buckling of the silicone structure in the proximity of the cable ttings, as depicted in Fig. 5(c). As opposed to the current design, a continuous approach could entail circumferentially placing one single cable at a cross section of the mantle within the silicone thickness and coiling the cable in a way which, ideally, would better approximate the shortening of the circumferential muscle. However, such a conguration does not guarantee that buckle or wrinkling of the silicone mantle would not occur, given the unpredictable reactions due to the friction between the cable and the silicone. Moreover, the tension on the cable during the coiling required for achieving a certain degree of cross-sectional reduction would be signicantly higher than in the case of the radially pulled cables, because the silicone walls would have to be compressed in the direction tangential to the cable. Finally, the capability of the silicone walls to return to the unstrained state would be signicantly hindered by the friction between the cable and the silicone. The choice for a discrete, radially oriented cable arrangement is thus justied by the low torque required for the crank mechanism to perform the collapse of the structure, as well as by the effectiveness of the mantle to elastically recover its inated state. The buckling associated with the traction of the cables does not visibly disrupts the slenderness of the body nor does it prevent the overall mechanism from offering a consistent representation of the pulsation cycle of a swimming octopus. The component of the robot which practically deals with the inow and outow of uid is addressed in the following section. C. Ingestion Valves Octopuses ingest ambient water via two valves located underneath the funnel. These valves are sealed during compression of the mantle chamber so that the uid is forced through the siphon. During expansion of the mantle chamber, the siphon collapses and the ingestion valves are ung open, thus permitting the inow and rell of the mantle (see Fig. 1). A functional replica of this entire process in a robot does either require to precisely control the opening/closing sequence of the valves and the nozzle or, alternatively, to exploit the passive behavior of the material which these components are made of. In order to address this issue, a funnel-shaped cast of PCL was manufactured with two openings (see Fig. 7). This component of the robot will be referred to as the mantlesiphon conjunction and serves the purpose of directing the ow from the mantle toward the nozzle, as well as providing the lodging for the nozzle and the ingestion valve. The lower aperture is crescent shaped and acts as ingestion valve; the upper opening is designed to accommodate an elastic silicone siphon or a rigid plexiglass siphon of circular cross section (see Fig. 7). A thin lm of silicone is glued over the crescent-shaped valve on the inside of the mantlesiphon conjunction. This silicone lm gets lifted during the phase of cable release, when the mantle cavity undergoes a pressure drop. When the cables are pulled and

Fig. 7. Prototype in its nal shape comprising of the mantle with the actuator and the mantlesiphon conjunction with the outow orice and the crescentshaped ingestion valve: (a) side view, (b) frontal view, and (c) ventral view.

pressurization occurs in the mantle chamber, the silicone lm drops down, sealing the crescent-shaped aperture. A qualitative analysis of the working process of the valve and nozzle reveals that the effectiveness of the valve at regulating the ingestion of ambient uid is partially hindered by the employment of a rigid siphon. This is because, in the case of a rigid nozzle, the inow through the nozzle rather than through the valve is facilitated. In contrast, the combination of silicone nozzle and valve appears as a very effective solution. In this case, the pressure drop in the mantle cavity causes the elastic nozzle to collapse. The extent to which the collapse of the nozzle occurs is dependent, to a large extent, on the thickness of the silicone cylindrical wall of the nozzle. Indeed, even a minimal strain of the nozzle-exit cross section is sufcient for the valve to become the preferential path of the inow. These observations suggest that, provided a sufcient pressure drop occurs in the mantle cavity, an efcient approximation of the inow/outow mechanism adopted by cephalopods can be achieved by adjusting the valve surface area, the valve orientation, and the nozzle thickness. IV. PROTOTYPE TESTING In its nal shape, the robot is composed of the elastic mantle, the mantlefunnel conjunction, and the internal actuator (see Fig. 7). Two ion-lithium batteries are immersed in the thicker layer of silicone stored in the upper portion of the mantle. A potentiometer and a switch are also included in order to comfortably adjust the voltage across the gearmotor. By regulating the torque and angular velocity of the gearmotor, the frequency of mantle compression and the force by which the cables are pulled can be varied. The robot is 160 mm long from the foremost to the rearmost point, 95 mm wide, and 80 mm tall at the largest cross section. The whole prototype, including electronic and mechanical components, weights 333.5 g, 212.0 g of

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TABLE III SUMMARY OF THE TESTS PERFORMED

which are silicone. The rigid components thus represent only the 36.5%, in mass, of the whole robot. In order to evaluate the swimming performances as a combination between the pulsation frequency and funnel characteristics, the velocity of the prototype is tested during its displacement along a straight track in water (see Table III). In this set of laboratory tests, three different nozzles are employed: namely two rigid plexiglass funnels and one soft silicone funnel. The pair of nozzles of the same material, respectively, have a diameter of 30.0 and 14.5 mm. The silicone nozzle has a 30.0-mm diameter. Each nozzle is mounted at the orice of the siphonmantle conjunction and a number of runs are performed at different pulsation frequencies. Two different gearmotors have been employed in order to perform the tests over different regimes of pulsation frequency. The GM12A (see Table II) was used for pulsation regimes in the range from 1 to 2.5 pps, while the GM11A (see Table I), was used in the range from 3 to 6.5 pps. Estimate of the expelled volume is achieved by measuring the volume of water stored within the mantle chamber when the cables are pulled (i.e., the mantle walls are contracted), which provides a value of 59 mL. This corresponds to 17% of the whole volume contained inside the mantle cavity under unstrained condition. In terms of mass percentage, the prototype is capable of ideally expelling as much as 18% of its entire mass. This value is fairly close to the 10% estimated by Trueman and Packard for octopuses with their arms still attached to the mantle [15]. From the estimate of the expelled volume, a theoretical vortex formation time is estimated to be equal to 2.8 and 25, respectively, for the 30.0-mm and 14.5-mm siphons. It is worth mentioning that, because the SUUV is not neutrally buoyant in water, an ad-hoc oat is attached to the dorsal part of the robot. The oat is shaped in such a way to minimize drag

Fig. 8. Velocity proles for (a) the 30.0-mm plexiglass and (b) silicone siphon. Values of pulsation frequency are annotated directly on the proles. In (a), tests 18 of Table III are presented, while in (b), tests 915 of Table III are presented.

at the free surface and allow the robot to travel below the free surface. In addition, the oat is allowed to slide along a wire held at the distal sides of the tank. The wire helps the robot maintain a straight line during testing without exerting any appreciable friction. The major drawback of this setup lies in the oscillation of the oat as a result of the discontinuous accelerations of the robot. This in turn gives rise to small waves at the free surface which generate a persistent noise in the recordings and, more importantly, slow down the robot as it gets closer to the endwall of the tank. The test rig entails a 118-cm-long, 50-cm-deep, and 50-cm-wide tank lled with tap water. The experiments are recorded with a 25 frames/s digital camera and then processed with an image tracking software from which displacement and velocity temporal proles are extracted. These are presented in Figs. 810. The complex dynamics involved in the activation of the soft robot is apparent in the set of results shown. It occurs that higher frequencies of pulsation coincide with lower effectiveness of the thrusting mechanism (see Figs. 8 and 9). In this respect, the major limiting factor is represented by the mechanism of passive ination of the mantle chamber. The stresses within the elastic wall of the mantle cause the expansion of the chamber which, in turn, drives the ingestion of ambient water. Being this mechanism purely passive, the recharge time is xed and solely determined by the geometry and material characteristics of the chamber. Hence, in order for the robot to perform a functional cycle of pulsation, the speed of revolution of the rod tted to the shaft has to be slow enough for the mantle walls to inate and,

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Fig. 9. Velocity proles for the 14.5-mm plexiglass siphon. Values of pulsation frequency are annotated directly on the proles. Here, tests 1622 of Table III are presented.

Fig. 10. Average velocity as a function of pulsation frequency for all the tests of Table III.

however, is not a desirable condition since the backward ow through the nozzle not only destroys the boundary layer along the cylindrical wall of the funnel, but it also convects vorticous uid remnant of the previous pulsation back into the funnel. This, according to Krieg and Mohseni [10], can represent a signicant limitation to the onset of nozzle-exit overpressure and to the generation of additional thrust hence provided. On the other hand, the silicone siphon is always subject to some degree of strain during mantle ination, which partially impedes the backow through the nozzle. By doing so, the siphon fosters the inow through the ingestion valve and supports the optimal conditions for producing the additional thrust provided by the onset of overpressure at the nozzle exit. This analysis is further supported by the comparison between test13 and 14 (see Table III). These two tests were both performed at 3.4 pps, for being the transition point between high and low frequencies. The difference between these tests lies in the way the nozzle was t to the mantlesiphon conjunction. In the rst case, the nozzle was simply stretched onto the original orice of the mantlesiphon conjunction. In the second case, a short plexiglass extension of the orice of the mantlesiphon conjunction was added and the nozzle was t onto this. The major difference between these two arrangements lies in the additional exibility of the silicone nozzle in the second case. In the rst case, the nozzle is partially stretched; therefore, only a short portion of the nozzle is allowed to collapse due to pressure drop in the mantle cavity. In the second case, the whole nozzle is allowed to collapse, hence better responding to pressure variation in the mantle cavity. The fact that, in test14, a higher speed of the robot is recorded reinforces the argument that unidirectionality of the ow enhances the thrust. V. CONCLUSION A novel prototype of soft robot has been presented which exploits the propulsive strategy of cephalopods to swim in the aquatic environment. In this respect, the robot is the rst one of its kind in that it combines the concepts of soft robotics with the principles of vortex-enhanced pulsed jet propulsion. A signicant effort has been put in designing a robot which could provide a rst insight of the yet unexplored eld of underwater soft robotics, as well as being used for the study of the propulsion of cephalopods. In order to comply with these stringent biomimetic requirements, an unconventional manufacturing process has been employed where a polyurethane mould of an actual octopus vulgaris has been used for casting an identical silicone replica of the original specimen. The robot was meant to propel itself in water by contracting the mantle chamber and expelling uid in a discontinuous fashion across a nozzle, in analogy with what cephalopods do. The current prototype relies on a cable driven actuation, by means of which several spots over the surface of the silicone mantle are pulled inward by a gearmotor located at the center of the mantle cavity. The process which accounts for the rell of the mantle cavity is also addressed here by designing an ingestion valve which operates similarly to those found in cephalopods. The cable-driven actuation, along with the inertia of the silicone

in this way, rell the chamber. By increasing the speed of the motor, the chamber is given less time to reinate, therefore less water will be available for expulsion at the following pulsation, thus depleting the thrust. In the case of the plexiglass siphon with larger diameter, at a frequency of 6.5 pps, hardly any relling of the mantle occurs and the robot starts to travel backward [see Fig. 8(a)], solely under the effect of the jerking of the silicone walls. The higher average velocities obtained with the 14.5-mm diameter siphon are associated with the water issuing faster from the nozzle, because at such high values of vortex formation time (see Table III), no additional thrust is supported by the nozzle-exit overpressure, as stated in [23] and [34]. The inverse correlation between frequency and speed of the robot is found across the whole set of experiments and is clearly highlighted in Fig. 10, where the average velocity of each run is plotted against the respective frequency of pulsation. These results also underline the importance of the interplay between the ingestion valve and the siphon. It is observed that when the silicone siphon is employed, the robot travels faster than when the analogous plexiglass siphon is mounted [see Fig. 8(a) and (b)]. In this case, the difference in performances is likely attributed to a closer approximation with the inow/outow mechanism of the living cephalopods. When the rigid siphon is employed, the rell phase entails an inow through the ingestion valve, as well as through the siphon. This,

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GIORGIO SERCHI et al.: BIOMIMETIC VORTEX PROPULSION: TOWARD THE NEW PARADIGM OF SOFT UNMANNED UNDERWATER VEHICLES 9

mantle, and the interplay between the ingestion valve and a collapsible nozzle give rise to a swimming routine which is extremely resemblant of the biological one. A number of tests have been performed in order to assess the actual swimming performances of this rst prototype. The major outcome of these experiments is the acknowledgment of the inverse correlation between frequency of pulsation and velocity of the robot. It occurs that a fast sequence of pulsation causes the ination of the mantle to become less effective at relling the mantle cavity, which in turn is reected in an impoverished capability of the mechanism to generate thrust. In addition, the data demonstrate the importance of the interplay between the siphon and the ingestion valve. The analysis of the velocity proles recorded suggests that the employment of a soft, collapsible nozzle may offer a signicant benet over a rigid one. This is justied by the role of the soft siphon in regulating the inow through the valve and the outow through the nozzle, hence promoting the onset of nozzle-exit overpressure. Indeed, these ndings are in evident agreement with what is observed in real cephalopods. As far as performances are concerned, the experiments demonstrate that a marked discrepancy occurs between the robot and the actual octopuses. Early work from [15] suggests that octopuses jetting at a frequency of 1.67 pps with an expelled volume of 53 mL at 1.26 m/s can travel as fast as 18 cm/s, while current experiments show that, when jetting at 1.5 pps, the soft robot expels water at a maximum jet velocity of 53 cm/s and travels at a maximum speed of 4 cm/s. The experiments performed herein are insightful of what design criteria require rigorous treatment in future development. On one hand, the effectiveness of the production of thrust lies in the capability of the crank mechanism to deliver fast jets with signicant volume of water as close as possible to the optimal vortex formation time. On the other hand, the major limiting factor is represented by the passive ination of the chamber during recharge phase. The drawbacks represented by the rell phase being passive can be attenuated by targeted design specications. Because the bending moment of an elastic plate is directly proportional to the bending rigidity which, in turn, varies as the product of Youngs modulus and the thickness of the plate to the third power, small variations in the geometry of the mantle and its rigidity correspond to ample variations in the rell time. The key factor in the design process hence lies in the accurate dimensioning of the composition and geometry of the mantle (i.e., recharge time) against the volume of uid which can be expelled and the torque delivered by the crank mechanism (i.e., thrust generated). The authors hope with this study to have posed the foundation for the development of a new exciting branch of research on what could be referred to as SUUVs.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank Dr. M. Calisti for his valuable help in the motion tracking of the soft robot.

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10 IEEE/ASME TRANSACTIONS ON MECHATRONICS

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Andrea Arienti is currently working toward the Undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy. He is working on his thesis at The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore SantAnna, Pisa, as part of the OCTOPUS Integrating Project (FP7, ICT 2007.8.5 Embodied Intelligence). His main research interests include the elds of bioinspired and soft robotics, underactuated structures and design of smart actuation systems, underwater robotics, and bioinspired propulsion systems.

Cecilia Laschi (M00SM12) received the M.Sc. degree in computer science from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 1993, and the Ph.D. degree in robotics from the University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy, in 1998. She is currently an Associate Professor of biorobotics at the Biorobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore SantAnna, Pisa, Italy. From 2001 to 2002, she was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Visiting Researcher at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. She has been and currently is involved in many National and European Union-funded projects. She has authored or coauthored more than 40 papers in ISI journals. She has been a Guest Co-Editor of Special Issues on Autonomous Robots of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, Applied Bionics and Biomechanics, and Advanced Robotics. Her research interests include the eld of biorobotics and is currently involved in research on humanoid and biomimetic robotics. Dr. Laschi is a member of the Editorial Board of Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, Applied Bionics and Biomechanics, and Advanced Robotics. She is a member of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, and of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, where she serves as an AdCom member.

Francesco Giorgio Serchi received the M.Sc. degree in marine sciences from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 2006, and the Ph.D. degree in computational uid dynamics from the Centre for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), University of Leeds, Leeds, U.K., in 2011. He was a Marie Curie Early Stage Training Fellow with the University of Leeds. He is currently with the Research Centre on Sea Technologies and Marine Robotics, Scuola Superiore SantAnna, Pisa, where he is involved in the CFD-OctoProp project on underwater bioinspired locomotion.