TY - JOUR
T1 - Animal and Robotic Locomotion on Wet Granular Media
AU - Bagheri, Hosain
AU - Taduru, Vishwarath
AU - Panchal, Sachin
AU - White, Shawn
AU - Marvi, Hamidreza
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank ASU Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) for animal husbandry (IACUC Protocol #: 16-1504R), Professor Dale DeNardo for greatly valuable suggestions on the choice of animal and animal experiments, Professor Heather Emady and Spandana Vajrala for fruitful discussions on studying wet granular media, Carolyn Harvey for her contributions to the setup development, Daniel Lee, Isaac Charcos, and John Millard for helping with animal data collection/analysis, and Arizona State University for funding.
Publisher Copyright:
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Most of the terrestrial environments are covered with some type of flowing ground; however, inadequate understanding of moving bodies interacting with complex granular substrates has hindered the development of terrestrial/all-terrain robots. Although there has been recent performance of experimental and computational studies of dry granular media, wet granular media remain largely unexplored. In particular, this encompasses animal locomotion analysis, robotic system performance, and the physics of granular media at different saturation levels. Given that the presence of liquid in granular media alters its properties significantly, it is advantageous to evaluate the locomotion of animals inhabiting semi-aquatic and tropical environments to learn more about effective locomotion strategies on such terrains. Lizards are versatile and highly agile animals. Therefore, this study evaluated the brown basilisk, which is a lizard species from such habitats that are known for their performance on wet granular media. An extensive locomotion study was performed on this species. The animal experiments showed that on higher saturation levels, velocity of the animal was increased due to an increase in the stride length. A basilisk-inspired robot was then developed to further study the locomotion on wet granular media and it was observed that the robot can also achieve higher velocities at increased saturation levels. This work can pave the way for developing robotic systems which can explore complex environments for scientific discovery, planetary exploration, or search-and-rescue missions.
AB - Most of the terrestrial environments are covered with some type of flowing ground; however, inadequate understanding of moving bodies interacting with complex granular substrates has hindered the development of terrestrial/all-terrain robots. Although there has been recent performance of experimental and computational studies of dry granular media, wet granular media remain largely unexplored. In particular, this encompasses animal locomotion analysis, robotic system performance, and the physics of granular media at different saturation levels. Given that the presence of liquid in granular media alters its properties significantly, it is advantageous to evaluate the locomotion of animals inhabiting semi-aquatic and tropical environments to learn more about effective locomotion strategies on such terrains. Lizards are versatile and highly agile animals. Therefore, this study evaluated the brown basilisk, which is a lizard species from such habitats that are known for their performance on wet granular media. An extensive locomotion study was performed on this species. The animal experiments showed that on higher saturation levels, velocity of the animal was increased due to an increase in the stride length. A basilisk-inspired robot was then developed to further study the locomotion on wet granular media and it was observed that the robot can also achieve higher velocities at increased saturation levels. This work can pave the way for developing robotic systems which can explore complex environments for scientific discovery, planetary exploration, or search-and-rescue missions.
KW - Basilisk lizard
KW - Bio-inspired robot
KW - Bipedal/quadrupedal locomotion
KW - Wet granular media
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85060963266&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85060963266&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-63537-8_2
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-63537-8_2
M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85060963266
SN - 0302-9743
VL - 10384 LNCS
SP - 13
EP - 24
JO - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
JF - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
T2 - 6th International Conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems, Living Machines 2017
Y2 - 26 July 2017 through 28 July 2017
ER -