English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Many animals, modern aircraft, and underwater vehicles use streamlined bodyshapes that reduce fluid dynamic drag to achieve fast and effective locomotionin air and water. Similarly, numerous small terrestrial animals move throughcluttered terrain where 3-D, multi-component obstacles like grass, shrubs,vines, and leaf litter resist motion, but it is unknown whether their bodyshape plays a major role in traversal. Few ground vehicles or terrestrialrobots have used body shape to effectively traverse cluttered terrain. Here, wechallenged forest-floor-dwelling discoid cockroaches possessing a thin, roundedbody to traverse tall, narrowly spaced, vertical, grass-like compliant beams.Animals displayed high traversal performance (79 +/- 12% probability and 3.4+/- 0.7 s time). Although we observed diverse traversal strategies, cockroachesprimarily (48 +/- 9 % probability) used a novel roll maneuver, allowing them torapidly traverse obstacle gaps narrower than half body width (2.0 +/- 0.5 straversal time). Reduction of body roundness by addition of artificial shellsnearly inhibited roll maneuvers and decreased traversal performance. Inspiredby this discovery, we added a thin, rounded exoskeletal shell to a legged robotwith a nearly cuboidal body, common to many existing terrestrial robots.Without adding sensory feedback or changing the open-loop control, the roundedshell enabled the robot to traverse beam obstacles with gaps narrower thanshell width via body roll. Terradynamically streamlined shapes can reduceterrain resistance and enhance traversability by assisting effective bodyreorientation via distributed mechanical feedback. Our findings highlight theneed to consider body shape to improve robot mobility in real-world terrainoften filled with clutter, and to develop better locomotor-ground contactmodels to understand interaction with complex terrain.

Terradynamically streamlined shapes in animals and robots enhances traversability through densely cluttered terrain