Overview
This research aims at investigating locomotion principles of biological and artificial actuators and sensing principles of biological and artificial sensors. As such, it seeks new locomotion and sensing paradigms of robotic artefacts that permit building new types of biologically inspired robots.
In particular, we focus investigating the locomotion of continuous bodies in water and flow sensing. We investigate how material properties of soft and continuous bodies determine the motion of the actuators, what are the roles of actuation, sensing, control and environment for the performance of a robot and how can we develop technology for continuous sensing and locomotion using the information gained from the investigations above.
We use biological data for comparison and seek to find the relevance of our work for evolutionary biology. We use methods of experimental fluid dynamics, numerical modelling, experimental mechanics and computational biology to investigate our problem.