These flexible feet help robots walk faster

"Robots need to be able to walk fast and efficiently on natural, uneven terrain so they can go everywhere humans can go, but maybe shouldn't," said Emily Lathrop, the paper's first author and a Ph.D. student at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. The researchers will present their findings at the RoboSoft conference which takes place virtually May 15 to July 15, 2020. "Usually, robots are only able to control motion at specific joints," said Michael T. Tolley, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego and senior author of the paper. "In this work, we showed that a robot that can control the stiffness, and hence the shape, of its feet outperforms traditional designs and is able to adapt to a wide variety of terrains." The feet are flexible spheres made from a latex membrane filled with coffee grounds.