Abstract
This study probes the underlying locomotion principles of earliest organisms that could both swim and walk. We hypothesize that properly coordinated leg and body movements could have provided a substantial benefit toward locomotion on complex media, such as early crawling on sand. In this extended abstract, we summarize some of our recent advances in integrating biology, physics and robotics to gain insight into tetrapod locomotor coordination and control principles. Here, we observe crawling salamanders as a biological model for studying tetrapod locomotion on sloped granular substrates. Further, geometric mechanics tools are used to provide a theoretical framework predicting efficacious body motions on yielding terrain. Finally, we employ these coordination strategies on a robophysical salamander model traversing a sandy slope. This analysis of salamander-like robotic motion in granular media can be seen as a first application of how tools from geometric mechanics can provide insight into the character and principles of legged locomotion.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Aguilar, J., Zhang, T., Qian, F., Kingsbury, M., McInroe, B., Mazouchova, N., Li, C., Maladen, R., Gong, C., Travers, M. and Hatton, R.L., Choset, H., Umbanhowar, P.B., Goldman, D.I.: A review on locomotion robophysics: the study of movement at the intersection of robotics, soft matter and dynamical systems. CoRR, abs/1602.04712 (2016)
Dai, J., Faraji, H., Gong, C., Hatton, R.L., Goldman, D.I., Choset, H.: Geometric swimming on a granular surface. In: Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems, AnnArbor, Michigan, June 2016
Gong, C., Goldman, D.I., Choset, H.: Simplifying gait design via shape basis optimization. In: Robotics: Science and Systems XII, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, 18–22 June 2016
Gong, C., Travers, M.J., Astley, H.C., Li, L., Mendelson, J.R., Goldman, D.I., Choset, H.: Kinematic gait synthesis for snake robots. Int. J. Robot. Res. 35(1–3), 100–113 (2016)
Gray, J., Hancock, G.J.: The propulsion of sea-urchin spermatozoa. J. Exp. Biol. 32(4), 802–814 (1955)
Hatton, R.L., Choset, H.: Geometric motion planning: the local connection, stokes theorem, and the importance of coordinate choice. Int. J. Robot. Res. 30(8), 988–1014 (2011)
Hatton, R.L., Ding, Y., Choset, H., Goldman, D.I.: Geometric visualization of self-propulsion in a complex medium. Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 078101 (2013)
Ijspeert, A.J., Crespi, A., Ryczko, D., Cabelguen, J.-M.: From swimming to walking with a salamander robot driven by a spinal cord model. Science 315(5817), 1416–1420 (2007)
Kelly, S.D., Murray, R.M.: Geometric phases and robotic locomotion. J. Robot. Syst. 12(6), 417–431 (1995)
Li, C., Umbanhowar, P.B., Komsuoglu, H., Koditschek, D.E., Goldman, D.I.: Sensitive dependence of the motion of a legged robot on granular media. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 106(9), 3029–3034 (2009)
McInroe, B., Astley, H.C., Gong, C., Kawano, S.M., Schiebel, P.E., Rieser, J.M., Choset, H., Blob, R.W., Goldman, D.I.: Tail use improves performance on soft substrates in models of early vertebrate land locomotors. Science 353(6295), 154–158 (2016)
Qian, F., Zhang, T., Daffon, K., Goldman, D.I.: An automated system for systematic testing of locomotion on heterogeneous granular media. In: International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots (CLAWAR) (2013)
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by NSF Physics of Living Systems. We would like to thank Lucy Clarkson for her assistance with the collection of animal data, Christian Hubicki and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments/suggestions on the paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ozkan Aydin, Y. et al. (2017). Geometric Mechanics Applied to Tetrapod Locomotion on Granular Media. In: Mangan, M., Cutkosky, M., Mura, A., Verschure, P., Prescott, T., Lepora, N. (eds) Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems. Living Machines 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10384. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63537-8_55
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63537-8_55
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63536-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63537-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)