ArticleScience advances2026
Adaptive multimodal swimming gaits in a reconfigurable modular soft robotic fish.
Article in Science advances, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- From Biological Mechanisms to Task-Oriented Design Principles: A Critical Review of Fish-like Biomimetic Robots.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Deep-Sea Soft Bionic Fish: Advances in Pressure-Tolerant Design, Soft Actuation, and Autonomous Systems.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Fish swim with four main gaits-anguilliform, subcarangiform, carangiform, and thunniform-produced by waves along varying portions of the body. However, how muscle activation length influences swimming performance remains poorly understood. We present a reconfigurable robotic fish that replicates all four gaits in a single platform by rapidly tuning its body stiffness. Vacuum-driven layer jamming muscles in four tensegrity joints enable quick (≤1 s) stiffness modulation (stiffness ratio of 46.6) and gait switching. In thunniform gait, the robot reaches 1.24 body lengths per second, whereas in anguilliform gait, it achieves agile maneuvering with a turning radius of 0.26 body lengths. Fluid simulations show that the thunniform gait generates stronger vortices and 142% more thrust compared with anguilliform motion at 5 Hz, explaining its high-speed performance. The robot dynamically adapts gaits during locomotion-using thunniform for fast traversal and anguilliform for obstacle negotiation-demonstrating environmental adaptability. This work advances understanding of aquatic multimodal locomotion.
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