CAREER: Morphological Computation for Resilient Dynamic Locomotion of Compliant Legged Robots with Application to Precision Agriculture

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project innovates compliant multi-legged robotics technology for precision agriculture. High agility, maneuverability, and payload capacity, combined with a small footprint, make legged robots well suited to precision agriculture applications. This project develops and experimentally validates a theoretical and computational framework for structurally compliant legged robots to navigate over natural terrain.

A systematic series of experiments will show how increasing the degree of compliance in the robot structure -- from passive elasticity in hip and waist joints, to fully deformable chassis and legs -- affects the efficiency and resilience of locomotion. The project integrates foundational robotics research on design, modeling, motion control, and planning into two educational and outreach programs across K-12 and higher education.

The first is a robotics makerspace for undergraduate students at the University of California-Riverside, and the second is a robotics summer academy camp for female middle-school students. Both efforts capitalize on student diversity at UC Riverside, a Hispanic Serving Institution, to broaden participation of under-represented minority groups.

The project investigates how compliance embedded into a legged robot can be harnessed to facilitate control and computation, with an eye to enabling efficient and resilient navigation in real agricultural fields. Research activities innovate along three key foundational robotics research directions. 1) Hardware design and dynamic modeling: The project offers fundamental insights and develops models regarding the effect of various forms of compliance on center of mass motion and gait stabilization for certain classes of legged robots and introduces new hardware designs that can harness compliance and enable principles of morphological computation. 2) Locomotion control: The project establishes compliance-aware legged locomotion controllers according to principles of whole-body and central pattern generator-based control to enable efficient closed-loop legged locomotion over a range of engineered and natural unstructured terrains. 3) Non-holonomic motion planning and autonomous navigation: The project develops non-holonomic motion planners that rely upon and utilize distinctive features of robot body morphology and embedded compliance for efficiency and resilience during autonomous legged locomotion over real agricultural fields.

This research can transform the science and technology of autonomous legged robots by making them more efficient and resilient in their operation, and thus unlock legged robots’ full potential in precision agriculture.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.