The ability of animals to sense and navigate complex environments is
unrivaled by even the most sophisticated robots. Nowhere is this more
challenging to understand than in the three-dimensional environment of
water, where animals are unconstrained by gravity with appendages and
bodies at the mercy of the complex fluid-structure interactions of
turbulent flow. Fishes, which comprise over half of all living
vertebrates, have an exquisite control mechanism for negotiating
turbulence. I will describe advances my lab has made in understanding
how fish swim in unsteady flows, and how by studying nature’s designs we
can reveal insights into some of the biggest challenges in engineering
and robotics.
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