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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…
It is important to understand how bipedal walkers balance and walk effectively on granular materials, such as sand and loose dirt, etc. This paper first presents a computational approach to obtain the motion and energy analysis of bipedal…
Future planetary exploration missions will require reaching challenging regions such as craters and steep slopes. Such regions are ubiquitous and present science-rich targets potentially containing information regarding the planet's…
Wheeled rovers have been the primary choice for lunar exploration due to their speed and efficiency. However, deeper areas, such as lunar caves and craters, require the mobility of legged robots. To do so, appropriate end effectors must be…
We report numerical simulations of strongly vibrated granular materials designed to mimic recent experiments performed both in presence [1] or absence [2] of gravity. We show that a model with impact velocity dependent restitution…
Soft robots - due to their intrinsic flexibility of the body - can adaptively navigate unstructured environments. One of the most popular locomotion gaits that has been implemented in soft robots is undulation. The undulation motion in soft…
For robots to navigate safely and efficiently on soft, granular terrains, it is crucial to gather information about the terrain's mechanical properties, which directly affect locomotion performance. Recent research has developed robotic…
Granular materials are an important physical realization of active matter. In vibration-fluidized granular matter, both diffusion and self-propulsion derive from the same collisional forcing, unlike many other active systems where there is…
In this paper, we use impact-induced acceleration in conjunction with periodic stick-slip to successfully and quickly transport parts vertically against gravity. We show analytically that vertical vibratory transport is more difficult than…
Elastic active matter or active solid consists of self-propelled units embedded in an elastic matrix. Active solid resists deformation; the shape-preserving property and the intrinsic non-equilibrium nature make active solids a superior…
Snakes can traverse almost all types of environments by bending their elongate bodies in 3-D to interact with the terrain. Similarly, a snake robot is a promising platform to perform critical tasks in various environments. Understanding how…
Experimental results are presented on the transport properties of granular materials on a vibratory conveyor. For circular oscillations of the shaking trough a non-monotonous dependence of the transport velocity on the normalized…
We present a locomotion mechanism that uses the stick-slip transition of a soft passive structure with an internal mechanical resonance. The structure is harmonically driven by a global vertical shaking and, because of its resonance…
A loosely packed bed of sand sits precariously on the fence between mechanically stable and flowing states. This has especially strong implications for animals or vehicles needing to navigate sandy environments, which can sink and become…
Flapping-wing robots offer significant versatility; however, achieving efficient multi-modal locomotion remains challenging. This paper presents the design, modeling, and experimentation of a novel tailless flapping-wing robot with three…
We study the mobility of objects embedded in an immersed granular packing and subjected to cyclic loadings. In this aim, we conducted experiments using glass beads immersed in water and a horizontal plate subjected to a cyclic uplift force.…
We create a mechanical digger able to move within 2D densely-packed granular media, in a manner intrinsically different from the existing biomimic diggers. The characteristics of our design include that the average grain size is about one…
A spherical robot has many practical advantages as the entire electronics are protected within a hull and can be carried easily by any Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). However, its use is limited due to finding mounts for sensors. Pendulum…
Spherical robots typically require at least two actuators to achieve controlled 2D planar motion. Here we present Rollbot, the first spherical robot capable of controllably maneuvering on a 2D plane with a single actuator, challenging this…
In this paper, we present an approach to study the behavior of compliant plates in granular media and optimize the performance of a robot that utilizes this technique for mobility. From previous work and fundamental tests on thin plate…