Fish Swimming in a Kármán Vortex Street:Kinematics, Sensory Biology and Energetics

Fishes often live in environments characterized by complex flows. To study the mechanisms of how fishes interact with unsteady flows, the periodic shedding of vortices behind cylinders has been employed to great effect. In particular, fishes that hold station in a vortex street (i.e., K?rm?n gaiting) show swimming kinematics that are distinct from their patterns of motion during freestream swimming in uniform flows, although both behaviors can be modeled as an undulatory body wave. K?rm?n gait kinematics are largely preserved across flow velocities. Larger fish have a shorter body wavelength and slower body wave speed than smaller fish, in contrast to freestream swimming where body wavelength and wave speed increases with size. The opportunity for K?rm?n gaiting only occurs under specific conditions of flow velocity and depends on the length of the fish; this is reflected in the highest probability of K?rm?n gaiting at intermediate flow velocities. Fish typically K?rm?n gait in a region of the cylinder wake where the velocity deficit is about 40% of the nominal flow. The lateral line plays a role in tuning the kinematics of the K?rm?n gait, since blocking it leads to aberrant kinematics. Vision allows fish to maintain a consistent position relative to the cylinder. In the dark, fish do not show the same preference to hold station behind a cylinder though K?rm?n gait kinematics are the same. When oxygen consumption level is measured, it reveals that K?rm?n gaiting represents about half of the cost of swimming in the freestreamauthorsversionPeer reviewe

Cooperative Object Transport in Multi-robot Systems:A Review of the State-of-the-Art

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in designing multi-robot systems (hereafter MRSs) to provide cost effective, fault-tolerant and reliable solutions to a variety of automated applications. Here, we review recent advancements in MRSs specifically designed for cooperative object transport, which requires the members of MRSs to coordinate their actions to transport objects from a starting position to a final destination. To achieve cooperative object transport, a wide range of transport, coordination and control strategies have been proposed. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive summary for this relatively heterogeneous and fast-growing body of scientific literature. While distilling the information, we purposefully avoid using hierarchical dichotomies, which have been traditionally used in the field of MRSs. Instead, we employ a coarse-grain approach by classifying each study based on the transport strategy used; pushing-only, grasping and caging. We identify key design constraints that may be shared among these studies despite considerable differences in their design methods. In the end, we discuss several open challenges and possible directions for future work to improve the performance of the current MRSs. Overall, we hope to increase the visibility and accessibility of the excellent studies in the field and provide a framework that helps the reader to navigate through them more effectivelypublishersversionPeer reviewe

#UKRAS22: The 5th UK Robotics and Autonomous Systems Conference

© 2022 EPSRC UK-Robotics and Autonomous Systems (UK-RAS) Network. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, to view a copy of the license, see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/As chairs of the UKRAS 2022 conference, we are happy to welcome you in person after a break from in-person events. The theme of this year’s conference is “Robotics for Unconstrained Environments”, reflecting much of the robotics research that happens at Aberystwyth University. Unconstrained environments include any indoor and outdoor environment that has not been modified specifically for the robot to perform its task. The premise is that the environment must be representative of the task rather than being artificially simplified

Supplementary material from "Why are biting flies attracted to blue objects?"

Diurnal biting flies are strongly attracted to blue objects. This behaviour is widely exploited for fly control, but its functional significance is debated. It is hypothesized that blue objects resemble animal hosts; blue surfaces resemble shaded resting places and blue attraction is a by-product of attraction to polarized light. We computed the fly photoreceptor signals elicited by a large sample of leaf and animal integument reflectance spectra, viewed under open/cloudy illumination and under woodland shade. We then trained artificial neural networks (ANNs) to distinguish animals from leaf backgrounds, and shaded from unshaded surfaces, in order to find the optimal means of doing so based upon the sensory information available to a fly. After training, we challenged ANNs to classify blue objects used in fly control. Trained ANNs could make both discriminations with high accuracy. They discriminated animals from leaves based upon blue-green photoreceptor opponency and commonly misclassified blue objects as animals. Meanwhile, they discriminated shaded from unshaded stimuli using achromatic cues and never misclassified blue objects as shaded. We conclude that blue-green opponency is the most effective means of discriminating animals from leaf backgrounds using a fly's sensory information, and that blue objects resemble animal hosts through such mechanisms

The interaction between vortices and a biomimetic flexible fin

The fluid-structure interaction of flexible bodies in steady and unsteady flow is a key area of interest for the development of underwater vehicles. In the design of marine vehicles the flow can often be seen as an obstacle to overcome, whilst in nature a fish interacts with the flow and is capable of achieving a high level of efficiency. Therefore by understanding how fish – or flexible bodies – interact with the flow we may be able to achieve a better level of co-operation between our vehicles and their environment, potentially attaining a better efficiency in design