Kinematics Simulation Based on Fluent of a Bionic Manta ray Robot

Abstract

The underwater robots are becoming a new direction of robotics in the future because of the increasingly demand on exploring the ocean. Due to thousands of years of evolution, marine organisms have better adaptance to the ocean. In order to design a more reasonable underwater robot, we analyzed different driving mode fishes as the bionic prototype and after comparision, we choose manta ray as our bionic object. A three-dimensional kinematic equation of insitu flapping wing under body coordinate system is given. And Solidworks is used to simplify and imitate the appearance of the manta fish. As well, we use ANSYS Fluent to simulate the dynamic pressure and velocity magnitude during the period of flapping fins and observe the formation and shedding of high-pressure center and high-velocity center, which is consistent with actual manta fish. Also we discuss the relationship between pressure, frequency and amplitude. The whole experiments proved that the manta fish prototype has great potential as a underwater propeller.