CAREER: Agile and Adaptable Confined Locomotion with Shape-Shifting Miniature Robots

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will fund research that attempts to enable transformative locomotion in insect-scale robots by endowing them with shape-shifting capabilities for achieving agile and adaptable locomotion in real-world environments. Natural terrains are complex and feature various types of clutters and confinements that restrict movement. In order to locomote through them effectively, robots must be small, as well as malleable and reconfigurable into terrain-specific body shapes just like their animal counterparts who expertly vary their body shapes and limb configurations. Thus inspired, this CAREER project aims to create a novel class of insect-scale exoskeletal robots that can passively conform to environmental restrictions, sense these constraints, and actively vary shape to be proficient at locomotion. In the long term, this research will improve the agility and adaptability of robotic systems and hasten their integration into real-world operations. Such shape-shifting miniature robots would squeeze through a pile of debris to autonomously locate survivors during search-and-rescue efforts, crawl inside a human body cavity to carefully remove tumors while assisting surgical procedures, or scurry between the blades of a jet engine to rapidly inspect and repair blade damage from bird collisions for the significant benefit of our society, health, and economy. The research is complemented by educational and outreach activities including project-based learning modules, lesson plans and training programs for K12 teachers, summer research programs for high school students, and interactive exhibits at distinguished science museums across Colorado. Research completed in association with this project intends create a novel class of shape-shifting insect-scale legged robots by focusing on three components – (1) Design body articulation to enhance adaptability via shape morphing and derive an empirical confined space locomotion model; (2) Incorporation of distributed sensing and actuation to actively control shape and improve agility; and (3) Development of a geometric mechanics modeling framework to find and optimize shape. By incorporating these innovations, this project intends to demonstrate novel insect-scale shape shifting robots capable of rapid, omnidirectional locomotion through laterally confined terrains, a first for legged systems. By leveraging insights from experimentally driven enhanced shape analysis and first principles-based effective shape finding, the project strives to take the first step towards rationally designing high-performance shape-shifting robots for applications beyond confined space locomotion. The project intends to demonstrate mapping and locomotion in GPS-denied confined environments utilizing a bioinspired tactile probe, a much-needed capability for effective complex real-world navigation. Finally, the project intends to contribute to several advances in integrated fabrication technology that enable new distributed sensing, actuation, and control in laminate designs at insect-scale for the first time to serve as a steppingstone towards realizing autonomic robotic structures embodying animal-like functionalities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.