"Researchers at EPFL have developed a highly agile flat swimming robot. This robot is smaller than a credit card, and propels on the water surface using a pair of undulating soft fins. The fins are driven at resonance by artificial muscles, allowing the robot to perform complex maneuvers. In the future, this robot can be used for monitoring water quality or help with measuring fertilizer concentrations in rice fields. The work was published in Science Robotics in February 2025.The EPFL labs involved are the Soft Tranducers lab (EPFL-LMTS) and the Unsteady flow diagnostics laboratory (EPFL-UNFOLD).
Read the paper here:
science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adr0721
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No101016411, project SOMIRO.
Video produced by: Florian HartmannVideo photography: Florian Hartmann, Michael Smith, and Stock videos from pexels.comMusic: ‘Movement’ by Oleg Fedak from Pixabay
