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Concept
Undulatory locomotion
Summary
Undulatory locomotion is the type of motion characterized by wave-like movement patterns that act to propel an animal forward. Examples of this type of gait include crawling in snakes, or swimming in the lamprey. Although this is typically the type of gait utilized by limbless animals, some creatures with limbs, such as the salamander, forgo use of their legs in certain environments and exhibit undulatory locomotion. In robotics this movement strategy is studied in order to create novel robotic devices capable of traversing a variety of environments.
In limbless locomotion, forward locomotion is generated by propagating flexural waves along the length of the animal's body. Forces generated between the animal and surrounding environment lead to a generation of alternating sideways forces that act to move the animal forward. These forces generate thrust and drag.
Simulation predicts that thrust and drag are dominated by viscous forces at low Reynolds numbers and inertial forces at higher Reynolds numbers. When the animal swims in a fluid, two main forces are thought to play a role:
Skin Friction: Generated due to the resistance of a fluid to shearing and is proportional to speed of the flow. This dominates undulatory swimming in spermatozoa and the nematode
Form Force: Generated by the differences in pressure on the surface of the body and it varies with the square of flow speed.
At low Reynolds number (Re~100), skin friction accounts for nearly all of the thrust and drag. For those animals which undulate at intermediate Reynolds number (Re~101), such as the Ascidian larvae, both skin friction and form force account for the production of drag and thrust. At high Reynolds number (Re~102), both skin friction and form force act to generate drag, but only form force produces thrust.
In animals that move without use of limbs, the most common feature of the locomotion is a rostral to caudal wave that travels down their body. However, this pattern can change based on the particular undulating animal, the environment, and the metric in which the animal is optimizing (i.
Official source
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