Research

The Pneufish Experiment

Previous work in the Lauder Lab has investigated aquatic locomotion using just the flexible foil, and they used a rod at the head of the foil to simulate undulatory motion. The problem with this setup is that the foil’s undulatory motion is then the result of outside forces on the body–it’s not self-propelling, which we can safely say all fish do to a certain extent. I’m using soft robotic pneumatic actuators (“pneunets”) attached to a flexible foil (where the complete apparatus is called the “pneufish”) to move beyond the previous platform to investigate self-propelling motion.

Notochord Biomechanics Experiment

I am interested in how the notochord changed between lamprey and lungfish, as well as how the development of the vertebrate column influenced the role of the notochord in swimming biomechanics.

A project page is in the works.

Others to come…