Sketching up designs for the AUV frame I keep getting drawn towards doing a bio-inspired design. As part of that design arc I have started looking at what other people have done with bio-inspired underwater drones. Two of the inspirations I keep getting drawn back to are the whale shark and the manta ray. So I was really excited to find this. Researchers created a tiny manta-ray inspired swimming robot.
Posting it here so everyone on the project can see it, but even if you don’t look at any of the other AUV stuff this work is awesome and I highly recommend looking at it.
On a larger scale, back in 2012 the Bio-Inspired Engineering Research Laboratory (BIER Lab) (http://www.bartsmithlabs.com/index.html) put together an interesting ROV ray based robot.
This video is worth watching. It does have that TV show puffery, but it makes up for it. The video shows how they used x-rays of cartilage of the rays as inspiration. It also shows their mechanical actuator for driving the fins in more details.
This is probably my favorite stingray inspired robot. Not really bio-inspired, but its still kind of awesome.
Update: Dec 17, 2017 – Just ran across this german company Festo, which also put out a ray inspired robot. Link to it Here.