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Flippered Robot Mimics Sea Creatures (Tracy Staedter, May 18, 2006, Discovery News

A new robot is shedding light on the locomotion of modern aquatic animals, and may also provide insight on how prehistoric giants such as the plesiosaur swam.

The biologically-inspired Madeleine robot, announced this month in the debut issue of Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, is an autonomous vehicle with four flippers designed to pitch up and down.

By experimenting with different combinations of flipper motion, biologist John Long of Vassar College and his team compared the efficiency two-flippered and four-flippered motion.

"What Madeleine has shown is that there are distinct differences and advantages to using just two. This has relevance to looking at the evolution of mammals themselves," said Frank Fish, professor of biology at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. Fish, an expert in the biomechanics of swimming animals, is not associated with the research.