Octopus Robot Zooms Through the Water with Ultra-Face Acceleration (VIDEO)

Imagine a robot that can zoom through the water with ultra-fast propulsion and acceleration. That's just what scientists have developed, creating a new machine that moves through the water like an octopus.

Most fast aquatic animals are sleek and slender. This allows them to move easily through the water. But cephalopods-like squid and octopus-are capable of high-speed escapes without this streamlined body. They fill their bodies with water and then quickly expel it to dart away.

Inspired by cephalopods, the researchers created a deformable octopus-like robot with a 3D printed skeleton with no moving parts and no energy storage device other than a thin elastic outer hull. The robot itself is 30 cm long and inflates with water and then rapidly deflates by shooting the water out through its base. This powers its outstanding propulsion and acceleration, despite starting from a non-streamlined shape. In fact, it can achieve more than 2.6 times the thrust of a rigid rocket doing the same maneuver.

The robot is capable to accelerating up to 10 body lengths in less than a second. In addition, the robot can accelerate a one kilogram payload up to 6 mph in less than a second. This is comparable to a mini-cooper carrying an addition 350 kg of weight, accelerating from a standstill to 60 mph in one second-underwater.

"Human-made underwater vehicles are designed to be as streamlined as possible, but with the exception of torpedoes, which use massive amounts of propellant, none of these vehicles achieve speeds of even a single body length per second or accelerations of .1 g, despite significant mechanical complexity," said Gabriel Weymouth, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Rigid bodies always lose energy to the surrounding water, but the rapidly shrinking form of the robot actually uses the water to help propel its ultra-fast escape, resulting in 53 percent energy efficiency, which is better than the upper estimates for fast-starting fish."

The new robot could mean a new way to power underwater vehicles. By taking inspiration from cephalopods, researchers have created a machine that could be hugely useful for underwater operations in the future.

The findings are published in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.

Want to see the robot in action? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.

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