METABOA · Exploring the Unexplored with a Crawling Soft Robot

I envision a new era for crawling robots capable of autonomously navigating complex environments. Nature's crawling experts, such as snakes, seamlessly combine body deformation and frictional interactions to achieve diverse locomotion patterns in dynamic habitats. Despite significant progress in mimicking their morphing behavior, current crawling soft robots lack versatility and autonomy, often underperforming due to a limited understanding and utilization of frictional interactions with their surroundings.In the METABOA project, I will investigate and quantify the fundamental mechanisms of friction in snake-inspired soft robotic locomotion by advancing the state of the art on three fronts:- Dynamic friction modulation through body-skin morphing: I will integrate origami and kirigami metamaterials into the robot's design, enabling coordinated movements and frictional adjustments at the robot-ground interface.- Enhanced environmental awareness through friction perception: I will incorporate integrated acoustic and vibration sensing mechanisms that maintain structural flexibility and uninterrupted contact states to measure body deformation and frictional interactions in real-time,- Friction-informed, bioinspired control and learning: I will develop a bioinspired neural controller that generates adaptive gaits and learns new sensorimotor behaviors, leveraging heightened environmental awareness to enable the robot to adapt to dynamic terrains.By synthesizing these three aspects, I aim to establish foundational design principles that will enable the creation of next-generation crawling soft robots with unparalleled adaptability and agility for navigating challenging environments. This groundbreaking approach paves the way for a new frontier in robotic locomotion, exploiting frictional interactions to conquer difficult terrains and explore otherwise inaccessible environments for applications such as search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and space exploration.