A team at the Mechatronics Instrumentation Laboratory, IIT Indore, India, has developed a soft robotic jellyfish based on shape memory alloy polymer for noiseless marine biomonitoring using smart and soft materials. Soft robotics is an emerging multi-dimensional dynamic in robotics, and SMA can be a suitable choice of soft actuator technology to mimic the gestures of living organisms. It is a smart material that can recover from induced deformation and restore its memorized shape when heated.
SMA-driven biomimetic jellyfish robot
The team tested the robot in a laboratory environment and achieved a movement of 1cm/s. The device uses an SMA spring-based mechanism to simulate the fluttering of the fish’s hind fins, which creates a propulsive force that pushes the robotic fish. The benefits of developing such soft robots are that they allow for noiseless actuation and simple and flexible designs, which consume less manufacturing time. The continuous heating and cooling of the SMA wire-based polymer structure is responsible for the expansion and contraction of the tentacles of its body, which generates thrust to move the jellyfish robot in the water.
The combination of soft and smart materials makes it possible to imitate and create flexible structures and complex movements like real underwater creatures. These robots can be used in many applications, such as underwater biological or coral reef research through some brilliant underwater cameras, or some spying from underwater to avoid unnecessary threats generated through water resources.