Bringing Attenborough’s Giant Sea Monster to Life

Luckily for Flip, Imperial is home to one of the UK’s largest state-of-the-art wave tanks. At 20 by 12 metres, with an adjustable seabed that grants depths up to 1.5 metres, the tank generates waves and currents so researchers can study their effects on natural and built environments. 

The mammoth tank sits within our Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s Hydrodynamics Lab – a 3,000m² facility that also houses a shallow-water tank and six flumes.

Research and teaching applications include everything from learning how best to install and maintain offshore wind farms, to how storms affect ships and how waves drive coastal erosion. 

But when Sir David and his crew came to film, the only waves to be seen were gentle ripples from robotic flippers. The only thunder, the imagined roars from the robotic plesiosaur; the only lightning, the festive twinkling of stage lights. The only erosion, the erosion of nerves. 

Dr Muscutt recalls: “Sir David immediately put me at ease - he really lives up to his reputation of being kind and modest. The Natural History Unit team were calm, professional, and organised, which meant I could focus on getting the robot working and showing this thing I had made to one of my heroes. It was a genuinely fun few hours.

“Like many people, I grew up watching Sir David. He inspired me as a naturalist, but also as an engineer, always adopting the latest camera technology and production methods. By the time I was born, he had already defined the nature of television broadcasting, particularly for natural history documentaries.” 

Flip will re-enter the tank to extend Dr Muscutt’s Southampton study, which will this time use more realistic flipper motions while accounting for the effects of the head and tail.

Dr Muscutt hopes to gather more evidence in support of his tandem flipper theory, with an eventual goal of being able to determine plesiosaurs’ swim speeds. He also wants to investigate how the head and neck are involved in steering and manoeuvrability.

These factors will be crucial in helping us to understand how the reptiles behaved and interacted with fellow Mesozoic ocean life.  

Flip is the first in a line of robots that Dr Muscutt plans to design and build: the 3D printers are back in action, recreating the delicate internal bone structures of plesiosaur flippers for the next robot.

Dr Muscutt hopes that adding these bones to the robot’s flippers will help to emulate their flexibility more realistically: “I want to find out how their swim speed and behaviour affected their lifestyle, and to precisely pin down how they fitted in to the Mesozoic food web."

With most of the work done, re-printing the robot should be a breeze, he says.

“The joy of 3D printing is that the majority of the work lies in the computer-aided design.

"Once it’s perfect on the computer, you just print it, with no messing around later – other than the assembly and a bit of sanding and painting.”

Based on Flip’s success, Dr Muscutt has secured sponsorship from FormLabs through Creat3D, who recognise that he is pushing the envelope of this emerging technology.  

As well as helping us to understand the prehistoric world, plesiosaurs and their modern robotic incarnations might teach us a thing or two about designing underwater vehicles.

By using flexible flippers instead of rigid propellers, for example, we might reduce disturbance and damage to marine life when conducting ecological and ocean research, and learn to manoeuvre search-and-rescue vehicles more easily and safely. 

Dr Muscutt is currently raising funds to take the robot on a public engagement tour of UK museums to teach the public about evolution, robotics, and the marine environment. Flip will then be proudly displayed at the Yorkshire Natural History Museum in an interactive exhibit. 

He concludes: “People have always looked to nature for inspiration - flying wings based on birds even appear in the Greek myths - but with modern materials, design techniques, and manufacturing processes, these adventurous ideas are becoming more feasible to implement.

"I love the idea of learning from nature, taking its designs and honing them to improve the world. There’s something artistic – almost elegant – in that.”