John Long: Darwin’s Devices

P. R. Bandyopadhyay, “Swimming and Flying in Nature—The Route Toward Applications: The Freeman Scholar Lecture,” Journal of Fluids Engineering 131, no. 3 (March 2009): 0318011–0318029.

Steven Vogel, Cats’ Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 10.

E-mail message from Melina Hale, January 7, 2011.

Full disclosure: I am hired by the European Commission as an outside expert evaluator of the FILOSE project, which the EC funds as part of their Seventh Framework Programme.

For the latest on FILOSE Fish, see this paper: M. Kruusmaa, T. Salumae, G. Toming, A. Ernits, and J. Ježov, “Swimming Speed Control and On-board Flow Sensing of an Artificial Trout,” Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference of Robotics and Automation (IEEE ICRA 2011), Shanghai, China, May 9–13, 2011.

See the full statement at this URL: cordis.europa.eu/fp7/understand_en.html.

Work on the fish and the biomimetic robot is explained in: O. M. Curet, N. A. Patankar, G. V. Lauder, and M. A. MacIver, “Aquatic Manoeuvering with Counter-Propagating Waves: A Novel Locomotive Strategy,” Journal of the Royal Society Interface 8, no. 60 (July 2011), 1041–1050, doi:10.1098/rsif.2010.0493.

For more on their robotic fish fin, see: Chris Phelan, James Tangorra, George Lauder, and Melina Hale, “A Biorobotic Model of the Sunfish Pectoral Fin for Investigations of Fin Sensorimotor Control,” Bioinspiration & Biomimetics 5, no. 3 (2010); James Louis Tangorra, S. Naomi Davidson, Ian W. Hunter, Peter G. A. Madden, George V. Lauder, Dong Haibo, Meliha Bozkurttas, and Rajat Mittal, “The Development of a Biologically Inspired Propulsor for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles,” IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering 32, no. 3 (2007): 533–550.

If you are interested in other fish-inspired robots, I review the field in “Biomimetics: Robotics Based on Fish Swimming,” in Encyclopedia of Fish Physiology: From Genome to Environment , vol. 1, edited by A. P. Farrell, 603–612 (San Diego: Academic Press, 2011).

Conversation at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, January 4, 2011.

I use the date of 1946 here because that was when President Truman created the ONR to “plan, foster and encourage scientific research in recognition of its paramount importance as related to the maintenance of future naval power, and the preservation of national security.” The Navy, however, considers ONR to have been started earlier, in 1923, as the Naval Research Laboratory. See their timeline at www.onr.navy.mil/About-ONR/History-ONR-Timeline.aspx.

In vibratory mechanics the natural frequency of a structure is proportional to the square root of its stiffness. Other factors, like mass and damping, shouldn’t be neglected because they play huge roles in how the structure moves.

Details of the experiments that originally led us to this prediction can be found in the following paper: J. H. Long Jr., M. J. McHenry, and N. C. Boetticher, “Undulatory Swimming: How Traveling Waves Are Produced and Modulated in Sunfish ( Lepomis gibbosus ),” Journal of Experimental Biology 192 (1994): 129–145.

You can read more about these early robotic fish in the following paper: M. J. McHenry, C. A. Pell, and J. H. Long Jr. “Mechanical Control of Swimming Speed: Stiffness and Axial Wave Form in an Undulatory Fish Model,” Journal of Experimental Biology 198 (1995): 2293–2305.

For a summary of the ONR’s biorobotics program through 2005, see P. R. Bandyopadhya, “Trends in Biorobotic Autonomous Undersea Vehicles,” IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering 30, no. 1 (2005): 109–139.

DARPA’s mission statement can be found at www.darpa.mil/mission.html.

For more on the design and performance of RiSE, see M. J. Spenko, G. C. Haynes, J. A. Saunders, M. R. Cutkosky, A. A. Rizzi, R. J. Full, and D. E. Koditschek, “Biologically Inspired Climbing with a Hexapedal Robot,” Journal of Field Robotics 25, no. 4 (2008): 223–242.

For example, see DARPA CBS-ONR-ARL US Navy Marine Mammal Program, Biosonar Program Office, SPAWAR Systems Center, San Diego, CA, 2002. See also Frank E. Fish, “Review of Natural Underwater Modes of Propulsion,” DARPA, 2000. More recent projects include bio-inspired underwater sensing and autonomous underwater navigation in rivers and estuaries. For more on the workings of DARPA, I recommend Michael Belfiore, The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2009).

I checked DARPA’s public solicitation on January 8, 2011, at www.darpa.mil/openclosedsolicitations.html.

As reported by John Markoff, “War Machines: Recruiting Robots for Combat,” New York Times , November 27, 2010.

Professor Arkin’s book is timely and opens up an important discussion: Ronald C. Arkin, Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots (Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2009).

Nowadays, the US Coast Guard has eleven missions: www.uscg.mil/top/missions/.

This is the translation given by Gilbert in his comprehensive book: Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 352. Horace’s phrase has other translations, including, “It is sweet and right to die for your country.”

This is an excerpt of Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which can be found in full and with notes at the War Poetry website: www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html.

Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).

Peter and Craig’s model can be found in this article: P. J. Czuwala, C. Blanchette, S. Varga, R. G. Root, and J. H. Long Jr., “A Mechanical Model for the Rapid Body Flexures of Fast-Starting Fish,” in Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Unmanned Untethered Submersible Technology (UUST) , 415–426 (Lee, NH: Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute, 1999). At the same meeting Rob presented this paper: R. G. Root, H-W. Courtland, C. A. Pell, B. Hobson, E. J. Twohig, R. J. Suter, W. R. Shepherd, III, N. Boetticher, and J. H. Long Jr., “Swimming Fish and Fish-like Models: The Harmonic Structure of Undulatory Waves Suggests That Fish Actively Tune Their Bodies,” in Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Unmanned Untethered Submersible Technology (UUST), 378–388 (Lee, NH: Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute, 1999).

The irony is that secrecy is enforced when I work with and advise companies. Both business and the military use secrecy to maintain an advantage over the competition or adversaries. For the record, I honor all of my agreements with businesses to keep our proprietary work secret.

The race continues unabated: E. Bumiller and T. Shanker, “War Evolves with Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs,” New York Times , June 19, 2011.