Inspired by crabs, cockroaches, and other nimble creatures, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have designed robotic vehicles to traverse complex terrain such as deserts and presumably the Martian landscape. Equipped with six spring-loaded and synchronously rotating C-shaped limbs, the robots outmaneuver current military and rescue vehicles over coarse but rigid terrain. On granular media, however, that agility comes at a cost: The latest robot model, the 30-cm-long SandBot, shown in the image and designed by Georgia Institute of Technology physicists in collaboration with the UPenn engineers, drops from a speed of 60 cm/s on a rigid surface to a crawl of 2 cm/s in a bed of poppy seeds. (See videos with this item at http://www.physicstoday.org.) Only when the researchers empirically tweak the limb-control parameters does the speed approach a respectable 30 cm/s. A team led by Daniel Goldman at Georgia Tech set out to determine how the...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
1 April 2009
April 01 2009
A robot walks, sinks, and swims in granular media
Physics Today 62 (4), 18 (2009);
Citation
Jermey N. A. Matthews; A robot walks, sinks, and swims in granular media. Physics Today 1 April 2009; 62 (4): 18. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4797101
Download citation file:
PERSONAL SUBSCRIPTION
Purchase an annual subscription for $25. A subscription grants you access to all of Physics Today's current and backfile content.
Sign In
You could not be signed in. Please check your credentials and make sure you have an active account and try again.
46
Views
Citing articles via
The lessons learned from ephemeral nuclei
Witold Nazarewicz; Lee G. Sobotka
FYI science policy briefs
Lindsay McKenzie; Jacob Taylor