Fast swimming with fake shark skin

摘要

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 toothlike 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.