Jack Stonecipher, Allen Gao, Wei Wang
Fish achieve efficient swimming across varied speeds through active modulation of their body flexibility. To explore the effects of tunable stiffness on swimming performance, we present a bio-inspired freely swimming fish robot with a rapidly tunable particle-jamming body. This design enables rapid stiffness adjustments with negligible changes in shape or volume, achieving a 54% variation in flexural rigidity across vacuum pressures of 0 to -40 kPa. We visualize the midline of the oscillating body under both low- and high-stiffness conditions, and the comparison confirms that the body curvature varies with stiffness. We further experimentally evaluate the tunable stiffness body's effects on swimming performance using velocity and cost of transport (CoT) measurements obtained via a motion tracking system. Results show that active stiffness tuning is essential for sustaining efficient and high-speed swimming across beating frequencies of 1-3 Hz. At low frequencies (1-1.5 Hz), a softer body (0 kPa) maximizes velocity and minimizes CoT, whereas at high frequencies (2.5-3 Hz), a stiffer body (-40 kPa) delivers superior velocity and reduced transport cost. These findings highlight stiffness modulation as a key strategy for adaptive and efficient propulsion in bio-inspired robotic swimmers.