A team of researchers, led by Sung-Jin Park and Professor Kevin Kit Parker at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, have found a way to meld bioinspiration with robotics and cybernetics with the creation of a fully controllable robotic ray that uses light-activated rat muscle cells to swim. Their research has just been published in Science, and it’s impressive. And also adorable.
On the right of this picture is a very cute real life batoid fish (a skate in this case, but stingrays are batoids too). Batoids swim quickly and efficiently by bending their fins in an undulating motion, sending a traveling wave from front to back that propels them forward in water. It’s also a simple motion that is nonetheless highly stable while still allowing for maneuverability, which makes a batoids “ideal biological models in robotics,” according to the researchers. On the left of the picture above, you can see the tiny robotic skate
via IEEE Spectrum
Image: Karaghen Hudson
