Engineers have crafted a robot capable of swimming within the water column, drawing on insights from natural swimmers to push design boundaries. This approach—watching living systems, then translating their tricks into machines—has yielded a family of bioinspired robots that mimic the agility and efficiency of swimmers in the wild. In this case, the goal was to produce a craft that can operate deep in the aquatic layer, where currents, turbulence, and pressure demand precise, adaptable motion from an autonomous platform.
As evolution refines organisms for their environments, roboticists increasingly turn to those time-tested solutions. Copying nature’s playbook has proved more effective than starting from scratch, yielding a spectrum of zoo-like robots that blend mechanical ingenuity with biological strategy. These devices range from flexible exosuits to tiny, multi-part swimmers, each designed to exploit specific propulsion modes, tail flexibility, and sensing arrangements that mirror natural swimmers. The result is a toolkit for underwater exploration that benefits from millions of years of trial and error encoded in living creatures.
For the Pleobot project, researchers found inspiration in krill—small crustaceans renowned for their ability to swim, accelerate, slow, and spin with remarkable control despite their diminutive size. The Pleobot is built around three articulated segments connected by a movable joint, enabling oscillatory motion that resembles the beating of natural fins. Its control architecture also supports the independent movement of forked fins, allowing nuanced maneuvering, stability adjustments, and power-efficient cruising through varying water conditions. This combination ofMechanical design and control strategy enables the robot to emulate a krill’s agile repertoire while maintaining the robustness required for extended field use.
The physical specimen is scaled up roughly tenfold compared with a real krill, though its overall length rarely exceeds about one centimeter in natural specimens. The principal components of the robot are compatible with three-dimensional printing, and the project team has published open plans to invite other research groups to build, test, or sensorize Pleobot. By sharing designs and calibration approaches, the effort aims to accelerate development of a broader science platform where researchers can study marine physics, collect data on flow fields, and test habitat models with a living-instrument approach—without the constraints of expensive custom tooling.
Looking ahead, investigators envision a future where such autonomous swimmers map Earth’s oceans with high-resolution coverage, tracking currents, temperature gradients, and chemical signatures. Beyond our planet, these plucky little robots could be deployed to the oceans of envisioned extraterrestrial seas in the solar system, such as those believed to lie beneath the icy crusts of Enceladus and Europa. The same core principles—soft, adaptable bodies, distributed sensing, and energy-efficient propulsion—could support exploration in harsh, remote environments where traditional rovers or larger underwater vehicles struggle to operate.
A separate historical note reveals that in Cordoba, an ancient Roman amphora once carried verses by the poet Virgil, highlighting the long arc of discovery where artifacts illuminate past knowledge and spark new lines of inquiry.