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Design and Analysis of a Novel Swimming Mechanism Inspired from Frogs

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Abstract

This article presents a design of a novel swimming mechanism based on a linkage mechanism. The generated motions of the proposed mechanism mimic the purely aquatic locomotion of frogs such as Xenopus laevis (X. laevis), including both the motions of the hind legs and the webbed foot. A six-bar linkage mechanism is employed in this study combing with a spatial linkage mechanism to simplify the overall mechanism. Attributes to the optimal design, the number of Degrees of Actuations (DoA) reduces to two in each hindlimb, which realizes miniaturization in the current study. Kinematic analysis is conducted to analyze the locomotion of the spatial mechanism. The hydrodynamic model based on the blade element theory is established to estimate the swimming performance of the designed mechanism. The peak thrust (approximately 0.2 N) is dramatically larger than the minimum drag (−0.023 N) observed in the experiment which increases the efficiency of the prototype’s swimming.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2018YFB2001303), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52075267), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant no. BK20210341), Grant the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 309201A8801), and the Open Fund of State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing System Technology.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechanical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210094, China

    Yucheng Tang, Xiaolong Yang, Lizhi Qi & Yulin Wang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing System Technology, Beijing Institute of Electronic System Engineering, Beijing, 100854, China

    Wei Liu

  3. Department of Computing, Mathematics and Engineering, University of Brighton, Brighton, BN2 4GJ, UK

    Yan Wang

Authors
  1. Yucheng Tang
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  2. Xiaolong Yang
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  3. Wei Liu
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  4. Lizhi Qi
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  5. Yan Wang
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  6. Yulin Wang
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Contributions

Yucheng Tang conceived the presented idea of the mechanism and organized the whole paper. Xiaolong Yang built the inversed kinematic modeling. Wei Liu built the CAD model and analyzed the assembly simulation. Lizhi Qi proposed multi-objective optimization and selected the design parameters. Yan Wang calculated the kinematic simulation of the designed mechanism. Yulin Wang analyzed the functions of the mechanism and he was responsible for planning and coordinating the steps of the research.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yulin Wang.

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The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Tang, Y., Yang, X., Liu, W. et al. Design and Analysis of a Novel Swimming Mechanism Inspired from Frogs. J Intell Robot Syst 105, 23 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-022-01638-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-022-01638-9

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