A Terradynamics of Legged Locomotion on Granular Media

By Chen Li, Tingnan Zhang, Daniel I. Goldman. 2013

465 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Walking on Sand Studies of objects moving through air or water have provided detailed models for designing objects with better flow dynamics. Examples include aircraft fins and wings, robots used as underwater probes, and even swimsuits to enhance swimmers' competitiveness. Much less is known about the mechanics of moving objects on or in materials that themselves have non-uniform dynamics. For example, when walking on a granular medium like sand, the moving leg and foot may penetrate to varying depths with small changes in material properties. Li et al. (p. 1408; see the Perspective by Hunt) study this system and develop a model for predicting the motion of legged bodies on granular media for a range of leg shapes and motion speeds. Factors that complicate the motion include leg shape and size and movement direction, as well as the size shape, and uniformity of the granular material. A model is developed to predict terrestrial animal locomotion on granular materials, where the terrain moves when stressed. [Also see Perspective by Hunt] The theories of aero- and hydrodynamics predict animal movement and device design in air and water through the computation of lift, drag, and thrust forces. Although models of terrestrial legged locomotion have focused on interactions with solid ground, many animals move on substrates that flow in response to intrusion. However, locomotor-ground interaction models on such flowable ground are often unavailable. We developed a force model for arbitrarily-shaped legs and bodies moving freely in granular media, and used this “terradynamics” to predict a small legged robot’s locomotion on granular media using various leg shapes and stride frequencies. Our study reveals a complex but generic dependence of stresses in granular media on intruder depth, orientation, and movement direction and gives insight into the effects of leg morphology and kinematics on movement.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Civil and Structural Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Sim-to-Real: Learning Agile Locomotion For Quadruped Robots (2018, methodology): “[26] showed that the transferability of open loop locomotion could be increased if carefully measured physical parameters were used in simulation.”
Beneath Our Feet: Strategies for Locomotion in Granular Media (2015, background): “We note that when reversals do not occur, such as in legged locomotion on granular media, agreement between RFT and experiments is excellent over a wide range of parameters (Li et al. 2013).”