To build a better crawly robot, add legs—lots of legs

When traveling on rough and unpredictable roads, the more legs the better — at least for robots. Balancing on two legs is somewhat hard; on four legs, it’s slightly easier. But what if you had many many legs, like a centipede? Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have found that by giving a robot multiple, connected legs, it allows the machine to easily clamber over landscapes with cracks, hills, and uneven surfaces without the need for extensive sensor systems. Their results are published in a study this week in the journal Science. The researchers from the School of Physics include Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor, and Baxi Chong, postdoctoral scholar and a Ph.D. graduate student in the Quantitative Biosciences program. Two scientists from the School of Mathematics involved in the study are Grigoriy Blekherman, professor, and Daniel Irvine, postdoctoral scholar. And three members of Goldman's Complex Rheology and Biomechanics (CRAB) Lab are study co-authors: Ph.D. graduate students Juntao He and Tianyu Wang, and Daniel Soto, postgraduate research assistant. (This story is also covered in QHubo News, CBC Radio, Tech Briefs, New Atlas, the BBC, and ScienceDaily. Popular Science also mentions the Georgia Tech research in its story on a separate multi-legged robot developed by researchers in Japan. And Baxi Chong wrote about the research in The Conversation which was reprinted in RoboHub.)