Robotics

A new generation of legged robots will navigate the world's trickiest terrain

Scooped up a year ago in California’s Mojave Desert and transplanted to a lab at Georgia Tech, the lizard holds our interest because of its truly peculiar feet. Those long, bony toes allow the reptile to navigate over sand, rocks, and the many other types of terrain it may face in the desert. In the lab, the bed of glass beads stands in for desert sand, and by blowing air through it or packing it down, we can make the ground looser or more solid. We then study how the lizard copes with the changes.

observations of the lizard, the crab, and the scorpion have helped shape our theory of sand locomotion

Indeed, with physics models built into their feet and brains, robots should one day be able to scramble across a rocky or sandy environment and learn, on their own, how to handle the changes in terrain from footstep to footstep. We can imagine thousands of SandBots scouring the surface of another world, stepping from a pile of rubble to a sandy patch with ease. That’s still a big challenge for today’s machines, but it’s something even a hatchling sea turtle can handle. Despite having appendages that are better suited for swimming, these remarkable animals must climb out of a deep hole in the ground, clamber over grass and debris, and move across sand to reach the water, where they will spend much of the rest of their lives.