Related papers: Mechanical principles of dynamic terrestrial self-…
Terrestrial animals often must self-right from an upside-down orientation on the ground to survive. Here, we compared self-righting strategies of the Madagascar hissing, American, and discoid cockroaches on a challenging flat, rigid,…
Animals and robots must self-right on the ground after overturning. Biology research described various strategies and motor patterns in many species. Robotics research devised many strategies. However, we do not well understand how the…
Animals and robots must right themselves after flipping over on the ground. The discoid cockroach pushes its wings against the ground in an attempt to dynamically self-right by a somersault. However, because this maneuver is strenuous, the…
Despite contending with constraints imposed by the environment, morphology, and physiology, animals move well by physically interactingwith the environment to use and transition between modes such as running, climbing, and self-righting. By…
Robots excel at avoiding obstacles but struggle to traverse complex 3-D terrain with cluttered large obstacles. By contrast, insects like cockroaches excel at doing so. Recent research in our lab elucidated how locomotor transitions emerge…
Randomness is common in biological and artificial systems, resulting either from stochasticity of the environment or noise in organisms or devices themselves. In locomotor control, randomness is typically considered a nuisance. For example,…
Many animals, modern aircraft, and underwater vehicles use streamlined body shapes that reduce fluid dynamic drag to achieve fast and effective locomotion in air and water. Similarly, numerous small terrestrial animals move through…
To traverse complex natural terrain, animals often transition between locomotor modes. It is well known that locomotor transitions can be induced by switching in neural control circuits or be driven by a need to minimize metabolic energetic…
Robots still struggle to dynamically traverse complex 3-D terrain with many large obstacles, an ability required for many critical applications. Body-obstacle interaction is often inevitable and induces perturbation and uncertainty in…
It is well known that animals can use neural and sensory feedback via vision, tactile sensing, and echolocation to negotiate obstacles. Similarly, most robots use deliberate or reactive planning to avoid obstacles, which relies on prior…
The flight characteristics of bats remarkably have been overlooked in aerial drone designs. Unlike other animals, bats leverage the manipulation of inertial dynamics to exhibit aerial flip turns when they perch. Inspired by this unique…
Centipede-like robots offer an effective and robust solution to navigation over complex terrain with minimal sensing. However, when climbing over obstacles, such multi-legged robots often elevate their center-of-mass into unstable…
We designed and built a three degrees-of-freedom (DOF) flapping wing robot, Flapperoo, to study the aerodynamic benefits of wing folding and twisting. Forces and moments of this physical model are measured in wind tunnel tests over a…
Centipede-like robots offer unique locomotion advantages due to their small cross-sectional area for accessing confined spaces, and their redundant legs enhance robustness in cluttered environments such as search-and-rescue and pipe…
Small animals and robots must often rapidly traverse large bump-like obstacles when moving through complex 3-D terrains, during which, in addition to leg-ground contact, their body inevitably comes into physical contact with the obstacles.…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
Developing a framework for the locomotion of a six-legged robot or a hexapod is a complex task that has extensive hardware and computational requirements. In this paper, we present a bio-inspired framework for the locomotion of a hexapod.…
Bipedal animals have diverse morphologies and advanced locomotion abilities. Terrestrial birds, in particular, display agile, efficient, and robust running motion, in which they exploit the interplay between the body segment masses and…
Crocodiles, known as one of the oldest and most resilient species on Earth, have demonstrated remarkable locomotor abilities both on land and in water, evolving over millennia to adapt to diverse environments. In this paper, we draw…
Jumping is an efficient locomotion strategy to traverse cluttered, uneven, or unstable environments in nature, yet replicating continuous, autonomous leaping in soft robots remains challenging due to limited energy storage and reliance on…