Discovery of fundamental principles which govern and limit effective locomotion (self-
propulsion) is of intellectual interest and practical importance. Human technology has …

Frictionally yielding media are a particular type of non-Newtonian fluids that significantly
deform under stress and do not recover their original shape. For example, mud, snow, soil …

Characterizing forces on deformable objects intruding into sand and soil requires
understanding the solid-and fluid-like responses of such substrates and their effect on the …

For small legged robots, ground contact interactions significantly affect the dynamics and
locomotion performance. In this article, we designed thin, robust capacitive tactile sensors …

SUMMARY A diversity of animals that run on solid, level, flat, non-slip surfaces appear to
bounce on their legs; elastic elements in the limbs can store and return energy during each …

Metachronal motions are ubiquitous in terrestrial and aquatic organisms and have attracted
substantial attention in engineering for their potential applications. Hard‐magnetic soft …

Crabs are adept at traversing natural terrains that are challenging for mobile robots. Curved
dactyls are a characteristic feature that engage terrain in order to resist wave forces in surf …

Natural substrates like sand, soil, leaf litter and snow vary widely in penetration resistance.
To search for principles of appendage design in robots and animals that permit high …

Minimally actuated millirobotic crawlers navigate unreliably over uneven terrain-even when
designed with inherent stability-mostly because of manufacturing variabilities and a lack of …

Recent advances in computational methods have made realistic large-scale simulations of
animal locomotion possible. This has resulted in numerous mathematical and computational …