Director: Luke Muscutt
This supergroup focused on developing a biomimetic robotic sea turtle that swims autonomously in a controlled environment. Inspired by past work on prehistoric marine creatures, particularly Luke Muscutt’s plesiosaur robot, the primary goal was to create a robot capable of forward swimming in a flume tank under test conditions. This work lays the foundation for a larger ambition: deploying the robot in real marine environments to observe sea turtle behaviour non-invasively. Traditional methods like GPS tagging can be intrusive, whereas a robotic turtle could seamlessly integrate and collect data without disruption.
Subgroups
Bodywork and Rear Flippers
Supervisor: Eifion Nightingale
Team: Angelos Angelidis, Harry Bliss, Deep Shah, Maxwell Wang
This team was tasked with creating a realistic shell and rear flippers of a robotic turtle that could house a front flipper mechanism and attach to a force balance. The main objectives for the shell were to design and manufacture a main outer body with a high
degree of geometric accuracy and realistic hydrodynamics when compared to real sea turtles.
Force Balance
Supervisor: Maria Charalambides
Team: Thilaxan Sivanathan, Josh Duvelle, Chloe Cheung , Zoe Tan
This group was tasked with developing a 4-degrees-of-freedom force balance to measure lift and thrust forces, as well as pitching and yaw moments acting on the sea turtle robot during swimming trials in the fume tank. Unlike traditional tagging methods, robotic platforms can integrate non-invasively into the natural habitat, enabling continuous lifestyle data collection without disrupting marine life.
Propulsion and Front Flippers
Supervisor: Mihailo Ristic
Team: Zitong Ren, Zhiyuan Huang, Sophie Morris, Sanskar Dasoondi
This group was tasked with designing the front flipper driving mechanism for the straight-line swimming of the turtle robot. The primary objective was to design a transmission system that translates the constant rotational motion of a single motor into locomotion patterns that mimic a real sea turtle’s front flipper. The hydrodynamics of the swimming of green sea turtles was researched in order to select the degrees of freedom to be facilitated by our mechanism.