Related papers: Characterization and Evaluation of Screw-Based Loc…
Robots "in-the-wild" encounter and must traverse widely varying terrain, ranging from solid ground to granular materials like sand to full liquids. Numerous approaches exist, including wheeled and legged robots, each excelling in specific…
Screw-based locomotion is a robust method of locomotion across a wide range of media including water, sand, and gravel. A challenge with screws is their significant number of impactful design parameters that affect locomotion performance.…
Amphibious robots, operating seamlessly across land and water, are advancing applications in conservation, disaster response, and defense. Their performance depends on locomotion mechanisms, actuation technologies, and sensor-control…
Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a…
Microorganisms and synthetic microswimmers often encounter complex environments consisting of networks of obstacles embedded into viscous fluids. Such settings include biological media, such as mucus with filamentous networks, as well as…
Locomotion is typically studied either in continuous media where bodies and legs experience forces generated by the flowing medium, or on solid substrates dominated by friction. In the former, centralized coordination is believed to…
The locomotion of flexible membrane-like organisms on top of curved surfaces appears in different contexts and scales. Still, such dynamics have not yet been quantitatively modeled and no realization of such motion in manmade systems has…
In this theoretical study, we present an analytical framework to investigate the slithering motion of snakes on flat surfaces. While previous studies have predominantly relied on numerical methods to identify optimal locomotion kinematics,…
Biological locomotion in nature is often achieved by the interaction between a flexible body and its surrounding medium. The interaction of a flexible body with granular media is less understood compared with viscous fluids partially due to…
Robotic exploration in extreme environments such as caves, oceans, and planetary surfaces pose significant challenges, particularly in locomotion across diverse terrains. Conventional wheeled or legged robots often struggle in these…
A theory is presented for wave-driven propulsion of floating bodies driven into oscillation at the fluid interface. By coupling the equations of motion of the body to a quasi-potential flow model of the fluid, we derive expressions for the…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
Soft machines typically exhibit slow locomotion speed and low manipulation strength because of intrinsic limitations of soft materials. Here, we present a generic design principle that harnesses mechanical instability for a variety of…
Achieving effective locomotion on diverse terrestrial substrates can require subtle changes of limb kinematics. Biologically inspired legged robots (physical models of organisms) have shown impressive mobility on hard ground but suffer…
Soft robotics has emerged as a promising technology that holds great potential for various application areas. This is due to soft materials unique properties, including flexibility, safety, and shock absorption, among others. Despite many…
Micro-organisms expend energy moving through complex media. While propulsion speed is an important property of locomotion, efficiency is another factor that may determine the swimming gait adopted by a micro-organism in order to locomote in…
This review considers a problem in the development of mobile robot adhesion methods with vertical surfaces and the appropriate locomotion mechanism design. The evolution of adhesion methods for wall-climbing robots (based on friction,…
Exploring and navigating in extreme environments, such as caves, oceans, and planetary bodies, are often too hazardous for humans, and as such, robots are possible surrogates. These robots are met with significant locomotion challenges that…
The current study presents a systematic investigation of the locomotion performance of a swimmer with a wide range of parameter settings. Two-dimensional simulations with the immersed boundary method are employed for the fluid-structure…
Soft robotic snakes made of compliant materials can continuously deform their bodies and, therefore, mimic the biological snakes' flexible and agile locomotion gaits better than their rigid-bodied counterparts. Without wheel support, to…