Vassar Alums Will Design Robots by Observing Baby Alligators
If you want to design a versatile robot, alligators are a pretty good model. Equally adept at walking on land and swimming in ponds or streams, they offer a way for researchers to study how animals move in different environments. That’s why two Vassar alums engaged in robotics research are closely monitoring the movements of about 40 baby gators they’ve brought to their lab at the University of California, Irvine.’’
“We are watching them swim in a big still-water tank and in a ‘flow tank’ that has them swim against the current,” said Kai Yung ’23, who is conducting his PhD research in biology under a fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The size of juvenile alligator tails—bigger than those of fish, but smaller than, say, shark tails—makes it relatively easy for the researchers to measure their muscles, key to understanding their capacity for swimming.
Yung is working with Matthew McHenry ’95, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the UC Irvine Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences. Another researcher at the university is measuring the energy the gators expend when they walk on platforms and across sandy surfaces.
Yung and McHenry say their first task is to measure how gators’ bodies bend as they swim. “Based on how curvy they are and how fast they're going, we estimate what the muscles are doing under the skin,” Yung explained. “We ask, ‘How much muscle power is needed to make the gator swim?’ Then we can build a robot that generates that power, in the shape of a gator.”
The goal is to build a robot that mimics alligators’ movements on which researchers can test their hypotheses about the fundamentals of swimming. A physical robot allows scientists to determine whether their model holds up under the laws of physics. “We can then theorize how muscles evolved for swimming in gators and in other swimmers like fish, sharks, whales, and maybe even dinosaurs,” said Yung.
The project, which will take years and require contributions from scientists across disciplines, brings together researchers from six labs at UC Irvine and other institutions, with funding from the U.S. Navy. “We have a Navy program director that we check in with for our scientific updates and he tells us what he thinks the best direction is, with the big picture in mind,” Yung said.
Yung and McHenry graduated from Vassar 28 years apart, yet both were introduced to the science of robotics by the same faculty member: Professor of Biology and Cognitive Science on the John Guy Vassar Chair John Long. “Matt joined my lab in 1991 and worked with me for four years,” Long said, “and then, all these years later, along comes Kai. I think he might be the first Vassar grad to be earning a PhD in the lab of another Vassar graduate.”
McHenry said Long taught him a lot about how basic scientific research is conducted. “And I’ve been going to the same meetings now as the ones John took me to when I was 18," he said. “It was definitely life-altering.”
Yung and McHenry say they’re excited to be launching their work with the baby alligators, but McHenry noted that like virtually all scientific research, the ultimate success of the project will hinge on the work of many scientists over the next several years. “Many people will graduate [from PhD programs] during this project and new people will join us,” he said. “This research will contain the work of dozens of people when it’s all said and done.”