Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology said their robots can move over complex, bumpy terrain and there is potential to use them for agriculture, space exploration, and even search and rescue.
“When you see a scurrying centipede, you’re basically seeing an animal that inhabits a world that is very different than our world of movement,” said researcher Daniel Goldman. “Our movement is largely dominated by inertia. If I swing my leg, I land on my foot and I move forward. But in the world of centipedes, if they stop wiggling their body parts and limbs, they basically stop moving instantly.”
Baxi Chong, a physics postdoctoral researcher, said: “We started this project to see what would happen if we had more legs on the robot: four, six, eight legs, and even 16 legs.”
The team developed a theory that adding leg pairs to the robot increases its ability to move robustly over challenging surfaces – a concept they call spatial redundancy.
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