ArticleScientific reports2023
Identification of the trade-off between speed and efficiency in undulatory swimming using a bio-inspired robot.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- From Biological Mechanisms to Task-Oriented Design Principles: A Critical Review of Fish-like Biomimetic Robots.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Swimming with robots: investigating fish locomotion, sensing, and schooling behavior with robotic swimmers.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Multisensory feedback makes swimming circuits robust against spinal transection and enables terrestrial crawling in elongate fish.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Bio-inspired neural networks with central pattern generators for learning multi-skill locomotion.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Balancing central control and sensory feedback produces adaptable and robust locomotor patterns in a spiking, neuromechanical model of the salamander spinal cord.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Robot motor learning shows emergence of frequency-modulated, robust swimming with an invariant Strouhal number.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Complex Modal Characteristic Analysis of a Tensegrity Robotic Fish's Body Waves.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Anguilliform swimmers, like eels or lampreys, are highly efficient swimmers. Key to understanding their performances is the relationship between the body's kinematics and resulting swimming speed and efficiency. But, we cannot prescribe kinematics to living fish, and it is challenging to measure their power consumption. Here, we characterise the swimming speed and cost of transport of a free-swimming undulatory bio-inspired robot as we vary its kinematic parameters, including joint amplitude, body wavelength, and frequency. We identify a trade-off between speed and efficiency. Speed, in terms of stride length, increases for increasing maximum tail angle, described by the newly proposed specific tail amplitude and reaches a maximum value around the specific tail amplitude of unity. Efficiency, in terms of the cost of transport, is affected by the whole-body motion. Cost of transport decreases for increasing travelling wave-like kinematics, and lower specific tail amplitudes. Our results suggest that live eels tend to choose efficiency over speed and provide insights into the key characteristics affecting undulatory swimming performance.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.