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Small animals and robots must often rapidly traverse large bump-likeobstacles when moving through complex 3-D terrains, during which, in additionto leg-ground contact, their body inevitably comes into physical contact withthe obstacles. However, we know little about the performance limits of largebump traversal and how body-terrain interaction affects traversal. To addressthese, we challenged the discoid cockroach and an open-loop six-legged robot todynamically run into a large bump of varying height to discover the maximaltraversal performance, and studied how locomotor modes and traversalperformance are affected by body-terrain interaction. Remarkably, during rapidrunning, both the animal and the robot were capable of dynamically traversing abump much higher than its hip height (up to 4 times the hip height for theanimal and 3 times for the robot, respectively) at traversal speeds typical ofrunning, with decreasing traversal probability with increasing bump height. Astability analysis using a novel locomotion energy landscape model explainedwhy traversal was more likely when the animal or robot approached the bump witha low initial body yaw and a high initial body pitch, and why deflection wasmore likely otherwise. Inspired by these principles, we demonstrated a novelcontrol strategy of active body pitching that increased the robot maximaltraversable bump height by 75%. Our study is a major step in establishing theframework of locomotion energy landscapes to understand locomotion in complex3-D terrains.

Body-terrain interaction affects large bump traversal of insects and legged robots