Soft and Bio-Inspired Legged Locomotion for Climbing in Extreme Environments

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The main goal will be to develop a legged robot, which can climb in extreme environments using soft and bio-inspired components. While wheeled robots can only be used until a certain inclination is reached anddrones only for a very limited time, legged robots can traverse even difficult terrains. The goal in using soft and bio-inspired components is to decrease the control complexity and the cost of producing such robots.The example environment chosen here is a volcano, in which long term measurements need to be made.Discussions with volcanologist Dr Emma Liu (UCL) have identified the potential for autonomous terrestrial robots to provide a platform for greatly improved volcano measurements in the field. The volcano is a dangerous environment, which makes it impractical for humans to conduct measurements, but also an environment which is difficult for wheeled robots to move in due to the special topology. Lastly, the use of UAVs is also only possible to a limited degree, as the measurements must be taken over a longer time frame. Because of this, this is a perfect scenario for legged climbing robots.While different legged robot systems exist, specifically for climbing in extreme environment, they are complex and expensive to manufacture, and as such are yet to be used in related real-world environments. By creating a soft legged robot, the cost of a single robot can be drastically reduced, due to cheaper materials such as silicone as well as through the reduced of use of sensors and computational power thanks to the embodied intelligence of soft robots.