Mitigating memory effects during undulatory locomotion on hysteretic materials
Name
elife-51412-v1.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
4.61 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
38cfe04ae722f9bae9dd40f50a3f0071
Author(s)
Schiebel, PE
Astley, HC
Rieser, JM
Agarwal, S
Hubicki, C
Hubbard, AM
Diaz, K
Mendelson, JR
Kamrin, K
Goldman, DI
Date Issued
June 1, 2020
Journal
eLife
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© Schiebel et al. While terrestrial locomotors often contend with permanently deformable substrates like sand, soil, and mud, principles of motion on such materials are lacking. We study the desert-specialist shovel-nosed snake traversing a model sand and find body inertia is negligible despite rapid transit and speed dependent granular reaction forces. New surface resistive force theory (RFT) calculation reveals how wave shape in these snakes minimizes material memory effects and optimizes escape performance given physiological power limitations. RFT explains the morphology and waveform-dependent performance of a diversity of non-sand-specialist snakes but overestimates the capability of those snakes which suffer high lateral slipping of the body. Robophysical experiments recapitulate aspects of these failure-prone snakes and elucidate how re-encountering previously deformed material hinders performance. This study reveals how memory effects stymied the locomotion of a diversity of snakes in our previous studies (Marvi et al., 2014) and indicates avenues to improve all-terrain robots.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.51412
