Simple Karman Street model

Karman gait is a fish locomotion mode that is observed in fish swimming between vortices shed from a cylinder (the so-called Karman Street). During Karman Gait fish shows a reduced muscle activity, revealing that sometimes fish can passively move against turbulent flow. A controller adapted to generate this kind of behavior in a robot fish is being developed, but the main problem by now is the complexity of the robot-environment interaction model in order to design the gait controller for the robot. This article describes a simplified Karman Street model that is supported with some CFD simulations. This model is currently being used to train robot fishes´ controllers before throwing them into water.