Rough terrain locomotion has remained one of the most challenging mobility questions. In 2022, NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program invited US academic institutions to participate NASA's Breakthrough, Innovative \& Game-changing (BIG) Idea competition by proposing novel mobility systems that can negotiate extremely rough terrain, lunar bumpy craters. In this competition, Northeastern University won NASA's top Artemis Award award by proposing an articulated robot tumbler called COBRA (Crater Observing Bio-inspired Rolling Articulator). This report briefly explains the underlying principles that made COBRA successful in competing with other concepts ranging from cable-driven to multi-legged designs from six other participating US institutions.
@article{arxiv.2311.14878,
title = {How Strong a Kick Should be to Topple Northeastern's Tumbling Robot?},
author = {Adarsh Salagame and Neha Bhattachan and Andre Caetano and Ian McCarthy and Henry Noyes and Brandon Petersen and Alexander Qiu and Matthew Schroeter and Nolan Smithwick and Konrad Sroka and Jason Widjaja and Yash Bohra and Kaushik Venkatesh and Kruthika Gangaraju and Paul Ghanem and Ioannis Mandralis and Eric Sihite and Arash Kalantari and Alireza Ramezani},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.14878},
year = {2023}
}