Faculty member receives Army Research Office grants

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 14:31:32 -0400

SMR IGERT faculty member Eric Tytell (Biology) is the recipient of two Army Research Office grants for support of research related to Soft Material Robotics. Both projects use fish to help understand how flexible organisms use their muscles to move effectively, despite perturbations or other strong forces from the fluid around them, which may help to discover strategies to control soft robots more effectively. One of these funded projects examines how fish may be able to change the effective stiffness of their bodies to help the accelerate more effectively. The other project addresses how the body and muscle can help dampen out the effects of perturbations from turbulence as a fish swims.

Professor Tytell also served on the organizing committee for a workshop on “Distributed Sensing, Actuation, and Control for Bio-Inspired Soft Robotics, which met Sept. 11-12 at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Professor Tytell’s research group at Tufts uses experimental and computational approaches to study the mechanics and neural control of swimming in fishes, including the fluid dynamics of undulatory propulsion, sensory physiology, and neural control of rhythmic behaviors.