Professor Jerrold E. Marsden
Demos

Locomotion

(1) swim1.avi [ 61.4 MB ] (2) swim2.avi [ 94.3 MB ] These are animations of a three-link mechanism swimming in a potential flow due to shape changes. To generate these animations, we considered a massless three-link body submerged in an ideal, incompressible fluid and asked the question: "starting from rest, can the three-link propel itself in a potential flow by controlling its shape variables (i.e., relative angles) only? Contact Eva Kanso, for more information.

Eva Kanso