Related papers: Optimal Snake Locomotion on Flat Surfaces: An Anal…
Soft robotic snakes (SRSs) have a unique combination of continuous and compliant properties that allow them to imitate the complex movements of biological snakes. Despite the previous attempts to develop SRSs, many have been limited to…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Undulatory locomotion is ubiquitous in nature and observed in different media, from the swimming of flagellated microorganisms in biological fluids, to the slithering of snakes on land, or the locomotion of sandfish lizards in sand. Despite…
Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…
The correlations in the motion of reptating polymers in their melt are investigated by means of kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of the three dimensional slithering snake version of the bond-fluctuation model. Surprisingly, the slithering…
One way of controlling friction and associated energy losses is to engineer a deterministic structural pattern on the surface of the rubbing parts (i.e., texture engineering). Custom texturing enhances the quality of lubrication, reduces…
In nature, a variety of limbless locomotion patterns flourish from the small or basic life form (Escherichia coli, the amoeba, etc.) to the large or intelligent creatures (e.g., slugs, starfishes, earthworms, octopuses, jellyfishes, and…
Many snakes live in deserts, forests, and river valleys and traverse challenging 3-D terrain like rocks, felled trees, and rubble, with obstacles as large as themselves and variable surface properties. By contrast, apart from branch…
Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…
Screw-based propulsion systems offer promising capabilities for amphibious mobility, yet face significant challenges in optimizing locomotion across water, granular materials, and transitional environments. This study presents a systematic…
Motivated by a possible convergence of terrestrial limbless locomotion strategies ultimately determined by interfacial effects, we show how both 3D gait alterations and locomotory adaptations to heterogeneous terrains can be understood…
Inspired by the dynamic coupling of moto-neurons and physical elasticity in animals, this work explores the possibility of generating locomotion gaits by utilizing physical oscillations in a soft snake by means of a low-level spiking neural…
Similar to their counterparts in nature, the flexible bodies of snake-like robots enhance their movement capability and adaptability in diverse environments. However, this flexibility corresponds to a complex control task involving highly…
Terrestrial locomotion requires generating appropriate ground reaction forces which depend on substrate geometry and physical properties. The richness of positions and orientations of terrain features in the 3-D world gives limbless animals…
Self-propelling organisms locomote via generation of patterns of self-deformation. Despite the diversity of body plans, internal actuation schemes and environments in limbless vertebrates and invertebrates, such organisms often use similar…
In this work we present a framework that is capable of accurately representing soft robotic actuators in a multiphysics environment in real-time. We propose a constraint-based dynamics model of a 1-dimensional pneumatic soft actuator that…
Snake robots are characterized by their ability to navigate through small spaces and loose terrain by utilizing efficient cyclic forms of locomotion. Soft snake robots are a subset of these robots which utilize soft, compliant actuators to…
Locomotion requires that an animal or robot be able to move itself forward farther than it moves backward in each gait cycle (formally, that it be able to break the symmetry of its interactions with the world). Previous work has established…
Many previous studies of sliding locomotion have assumed that body inertia is negligible. Here we optimize the kinematics of a three-link body for efficient locomotion and include among the kinematic parameters the temporal period of…
Animal movement exhibits complex behavior which can be influenced by unobserved environmental conditions. We propose a model which allows for a spatially-varying movement rate and spatially-varying drift through a semiparametric potential…