A cyborg jellyfish equipped with a swimming cap and an electric propulsion system can swim at four times its natural speed, and could be used for deep-sea exploration.
at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues had previously shown that a live jellyfish with neuron-stimulating electronics could swim nearly three times faster than a non-augmented jellyfish in a laboratory setting.
Now, Dabiri and his team have given the creatures a further upgrade in the form of a streamlined plastic cap that markedly improves the jellyfishes鈥� swimming speed. 鈥淐ertain geometric shapes added to the jellyfish can make them even more efficient swimmers than what nature evolved over millions of years,鈥� says Dabiri.
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The cap also doubles the jellyfishes鈥� natural volume and has the potential to act as a storage pouch for a battery pack or sensors, although the team hasn鈥檛 tried this yet.
To test the jellyfishes鈥� mobility, the researchers placed them in a 6-metre-tall, 13,600-litre saltwater tank, giving them more room to manoeuvre than in previous trials. These tests only lasted for around a minute; the team will need longer experiments of days or weeks to make sure the modifications don鈥檛 harm the jellyfish, says Dabiri. However, the animals don鈥檛 have pain receptors, so it is unlikely they experience physical pain in the way humans do, he says.
At around $20 each, the cyborg attachments are cheap to manufacture, which could make them useful for a range of ocean exploration and monitoring tasks that typically require expensive and complicated robots, says at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
arXiv
