Bioinspired Marine Robots

I have an ongoing project to design, build, and deploy aquatic biomimetic robots. The most exciting one we have done is a sea turtle, which has biomimetic soft deformable flippers containing embedded articulated “skeletons.” The goal for the project is to produce a minimally invasive amphibious system for marine environment exploration. We are also using it to explore problems in control and reinforcement learning. We hope the platforms we develop provide an accessible way for experts in control and perception to get involved in the exciting bioinspired marine robotics space. We recently took the robot to St. John, USVI, for the first field deployment of our robot.

We presented a preliminary version of this work at IROS in 2023 (shown in the below gif), but the majority of the work is so far unpublished.

As this is ongoing work, we will be uploading more content shortly.

Publications

• J. M. Bern, Z. J. Patterson, L. Z. Yañez, K. K. Misquitta, and D. Rus, “A Fabrication and Simulation Recipe for Untethering Soft-Rigid Robots with Cable-Driven Stiffness Modulation,” IROS, Oct. 2023. Link