CAREER: Dynamics of Extreme Locomotion in Biological and Bioinspired Systems: The Effect of Elasticity on Mobility and Mechanical Power Flow

Animals such as cheetahs are often thought of as the exemplars of fast movement, when in fact small animals such as arthropods like trap-jaw ants, click beetles, and mantis shrimps can achieve accelerations six orders of magnitudes more than a cheetah. The overall goal of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant is to develop analytical and experimental tools to evaluate the dynamics of organisms capable of extreme accelerations and applying these principles towards designing a jumping micro-scale robot, using click beetles as a case study organism.

Click beetles belong to a group of organisms that use latches and springs to amplify their muscle power output and circumvent the same actuation limitations that currently cripple micro-robots. The current state of the art in modeling such organisms lack the proper dynamic considerations that would allow engineers to implement the appropriate principles to engineered systems.

The techniques developed in this project are beneficial to both biology and engineering. The modeling approach creates a framework to analyze a diverse group of organisms that use springs and latches to move extremely fast. These bioinspired principles enable a design framework for micro-robots to direct power towards the robot’s components for locomotion and dissipate energy elsewhere to prevent mechanical failure.

The bioinspired nature of this research makes it an excellent candidate for outreach. Outreach activities include workshops and summer camps for first-generation undergraduates and low income and unrepresented high and middle school students to encourage them to pursue higher education, especially in STEM-related fields.

This work will advance the fundamental knowledge of the dynamics of ultra-fast locomotion in biology and bio-inspired systems. Most of the literature studying these locomotion strategies in biological systems focus on observing the kinematics only or use overly simplified models for the dynamics. The modeling approach, namely mobility power flow provides insights into how an organism uses and augments muscle power output and how it transmits and dissipates this power for agile locomotion while mitigating damage.

In the planned modeling approach, click beetles or micro-robots are represented as a global structure composed of substructures on elastic and rigid substrates to model various environments. Expressions for power transmission and dissipation through each substructure and at the junctions will be studied through mechanical mobility functions, which can be derived analytically or measured directly in experiments.

The models and experimentation techniques will create a new pathway to study and design ultra-fast and small dynamic systems.

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.