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Computer Engineering

Aaron M. Hoover

Selected Works

Granular media

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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Walking And Running On Yielding And Fluidizing Ground, Feifei Quan, Tingnan Zhang, Chen Li, Pierangelo Masarati, Aaron M. Hoover, Paul Birkmeyer, Andrew Pullin, Ronald S. Fearing, Daniel I. Goldman Sep 2013

Walking And Running On Yielding And Fluidizing Ground, Feifei Quan, Tingnan Zhang, Chen Li, Pierangelo Masarati, Aaron M. Hoover, Paul Birkmeyer, Andrew Pullin, Ronald S. Fearing, Daniel I. Goldman

Aaron M. Hoover

We study the detailed locomotor mechanics of a small, lightweight robot (DynaRoACH, 10 cm, 25 g) which can move on a granular substrate of closely packed 3 mm diameter glass particles at speeds up to 50 cm/s (5 body length/s), approaching the performance of small, highperforming, desert-dwelling lizards. To reveal how the robot achieves this high performance, we used high speed imaging to capture kinematics, and developed a numerical multi-body simulation of the robot coupled to an experimentally validated discrete element method (DEM) simulation of the granular media. Average forward speeds measured in both experiment and simulation agreed well, and …


Systematic Study Of The Performance Of Small Robots On Controlled Laboratory Substrates, Chen Li, Aaron Hoover, Paul Birkmeyer, Paul Umbanhowar, Ronald Fearing, Daniel Goldman Jul 2012

Systematic Study Of The Performance Of Small Robots On Controlled Laboratory Substrates, Chen Li, Aaron Hoover, Paul Birkmeyer, Paul Umbanhowar, Ronald Fearing, Daniel Goldman

Aaron M. Hoover

The design of robots able to locomote effectively over a diversity of terrain requires detailed ground interaction models; unfortunately such models are lacking due to the complicated response of real world substrates which can yield and flow in response to loading. To advance our understanding of the relevant modeling and design issues, we conduct a comparative study of the performance of DASH and RoACH, two small, biologically inspired, six legged, lightweight (~10 cm, ~20 g) robots fabricated using the smart composite microstructure (SCM) process. We systematically examine performance of both robots on rigid and flowing substrates. Varying both ground properties …