Elliot Hawkes
University of California, Santa Barbara
Hawkes will develop a team of small, agile jumping, and self-anchoring robots that will both be able to move over obstacles and through challenging terrain as well as apply significant forces to the environment. The small robots will be capable of jumping unprecedented heights and distances, enabling them to access extreme terrain. Further, each will be capable of “growing” root-like structures into the soil such that each will be able to create reaction forces one or more orders of magnitude larger than its weight, and when working in a coordinated team, will be able to perform high-force environmental interaction. The proposed concept will lead to substantial system-level advantages. The robot team will be: (i) small, light and inexpensive, due to anchoring and load-sharing to generate reaction forces even in low gravity environments; (ii) operationally simple, due to simple robot design; and (iii) redundant with increased system reliability due to multiple robot team members.