Untethered squid robot could help study coral reefs

The researchers from the University of California San Diego detail their work in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.

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"Essentially, we recreated all the key features that squids use for high-speed swimming," said Michael T. Tolley, one of the paper's senior authors and a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego. "This is the first untethered robot that can generate jet pulses for rapid locomotion like the squid and can achieve these jet pulses by changing its body shape, which improves swimming efficiency."

This squid robot is composed mainly of soft materials such as acrylic polymer, plus a few rigid, 3D printed and laser cut parts. Soft robots in underwater exploration can protect fish and coral but they tend to move slowly and have difficulty manoeuvring. This prompted the research team to look at cephalopods to solve some of these issues. In particular, squid can reach the fastest speeds of any aquatic invertebrates due to a jet propulsion mechanism.