Meeting Abstract
Robotic control of animal locomotion can potentially address questions about organismal biology and animal-fluid interactions, which are otherwise limited to observations of natural behavior. This work demonstrates a biohybrid robot that uses a low-power, wireless microelectronic system to induce forward swimming in live jellyfish, Aurelia aurita. When bell contractions are externally driven at a frequency range higher than observed in natural behavior, swimming speeds can be enhanced nearly threefold. This microelectronic system was also used to determine the metabolic response of the jellyfish over this optimal frequency range, which was only a twofold increase in cost of transport to the animal compared to unstimulated swimming. These experimental results are consistent with an adapted hydrodynamic model, developed to characterize enhanced propulsion and match more biologically relevant kinematic and body morphological parameters. Thus, jellyfish can sustain the associated higher metabolic costs of increased swimming speeds. This capability can possibly be leveraged in applications such as ocean monitoring and robotic sampling for ecological uses, and to enable more user-controlled studies of swimming organisms in lab and in-situ experiments.
