Snakes use undulatory swimming to move efficiently through water, and different species show distinct patterns depending on their morphology and environment. With datasets available from live swimming tests and access to an undulatory robot, we can combine data analysis and physical experiments to explore their performance systematically and address biological questions.

Project Description:

The goal of this project is to analyse and replicate the diversity of swimming gaits in snakes using kinematic data from different species and a robot to explore insights into energy consumption. We’ll use reduced-order modelling to extract dominant motion patterns and look for structure in the data, for example, clustering gaits by species or lifestyle. Based on these results, we’ll test a few representative cases on a robotic platform to evaluate how well the robot can replicate biological gaits and how performance (e.g. speed, efficiency) varies with different strategies.

Specific Goals:

• Analyse snake swimming data to extract key gait parameters (e.g. curvature, amplitude, frequency)
• Perform reduced-order modelling to identify dominant gait modes.
• Cluster the gaits by species, morphology, or habitat.
• Select a few representative gaits and implement them on an undulatory robot.
• Run experiments to evaluate robotic performance across gaits.
• Compare biological and robotic results to identify general trends.