A material that mimics shark skin enables a swimming robot to move quickly through the water by improving hydrodynamics.
Li Wen, James Weaver and George Lauder at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, used three-dimensional printing to embed thousands of rigid tooth-like scales on a flexible membrane (pictured), based on the skin structure of the shortfin mako shark (Isurus oxyrinchus). The authors compared the synthetic shark skin to a smooth control model in a robot swim test and found that the experimental skin moved 6.6% faster.
The skin eases swimming both by reducing drag and by generating vortices that boost thrust, the authors suggest.
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Fast swimming with fake shark skin. Nature 509, 402 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/509402a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/509402a
