Towards a Finned-Swimming Exoskeleton: A Robotic Flutter Kicking Testbed and its Corresponding Thrust Generation

While lower limb exoskeletons for above-ground locomotion have been emerging, few attempts have been made to develop an exoskeleton to augment human swimming. Such efforts are hindered by a lack of knowledge surrounding the kinematics and kinetics of human swimming. This paper presents the design of a robotic platform to be used as a finned swimming testbed; describes a controller to generate finned swimming movement; and presents experiments and associated experimental results conducted to explore thrust production resulting from a flutter kick swimming motion.