One of the most critical aspect in the development of bioinspired Autonomous Underwater Robot (AUR) is
the power supply because of the aquatic environment (that requires to study a specific
locomotion strategy) and
the small dimensions (that make difficult to store large quantities of power); at present, the state of
the art of energy storage are lithium batteries.
The novel actuators developed during the LAMPETRA project reduce significatively energy consumption,
achieving high performances.
The video below presents the new lamprey artefact prototype; it can swim for three hours at 0.7m/s
using ~4W. These features represent a step forward compared to the previous prototype,
which has electromagnetic actuation and required high power for operation (~200W through power cord).
The current work reduces the power consumption using a novel design of actuators developed at
Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna - CRIM Lab (National Patent ID: FI2008A000150; International Patent ID: PCT/IB2009/053376).
We also encreased the number of actuated segments.
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