University of California - Santa Barbara
We’ve seen robots take to the air, dive beneath the waves and perform all sorts of maneuvers on land. Now, researchers at UC Santa Barbara and Georgia Institute of Technology are exploring a new frontier: the ground beneath our feet. Taking their cues from plants and animals that have evolved to navigate subterranean spaces, they’ve developed a fast, controllable soft robot that can burrow through sand. The technology not only enables new applications for fast, precise and minimally invasive movement underground, but also lays mechanical foundations for new types of robots.
“The biggest challenges with moving through the ground are simply the forces involved,” said Nicholas Naclerio, a graduate student researcher in the lab of UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering professor Elliot Hawkes and lead author of a paper on the cover of the journal Science Robotics. Whereas air and water offer little resistance to objects moving through t
Researchers explore shallow underground world with a burrowing soft robot
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Subterranean investigations
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IMAGE: Engineers and physicists from MIT and Georgia Tech are enabling near real-time modeling of wheels, treads, and desert animals traveling at high speeds across sandy terrains. Dynamic Resistive Force Theory, . view more
Credit: Photo by Jack Delulio on Unsplash
Granular materials, such as sand and gravel, are an interesting class of materials. They can display solid, liquid, and gas-like properties, depending on the scenario. But things can get complicated in cases of high-speed vehicle locomotion, which cause these materials to enter a triple-phase nature, acting like all three fundamental phases of matter at the same time.
As reported in the April 23, 2021 issue of the journal