Collaborative Research: Geometric Mechanics for Locomoting Systems

合作研究：运动系统的几何力学

• 批准号: 1361778
• 负责人: Daniel Goldman
• 金额: $ 15万
• 依托单位: Georgia Tech Research Corporation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-08-01 至 2017-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1361778&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Geometric; Mechanics; Locomoting

This effort seeks to understand and develop strategies for effective movement in biological and synthetic locomoting systems. Gaits are a fundamental aspect of animal locomotion; examples include a horse's walking, a fish's strokes, and a snake's slithering. In these motions, the animals undergo cyclic motions which interact with the surrounding environment to gain a net displacement over each cycle. The efficacy of such gaits suggests they form a core capability in locomotion of mechanical systems. Understanding the principles of gait-based locomotion offers two opportunities: to gain deep insight into biological processes and to create sophisticated synthetic locomotors to send mechanical systems into dangerous and dirty environments. To gain this insight, questions arise: how to model locomotion, and with this model, how to both evaluate and design gaits to achieve desired locomotive capabilities? In this project, the focus will be on limbless locomotors, including snakes, slender lizards, bacteria, spermatozoa and nematode worms. Limbless locomotor controllers for confined space applications, such as search and rescue in collapsed buildings and landslide debris, will be developed.The investigators' preliminary work reveals that geometric mechanics allows intuitive understanding of how and why gaits, produce successful locomotion. Much of the prior work with geometric tools, however, provided computationally burdensome approaches to design gaits: choose parameterized basis functions for gaits, simulate the motion of the system and then optimize the input parameters to find gaits that meet the design requirements. Such optimization with forward simulation is computationally expensive. Moreover, existing geometric approaches ignore real world considerations such as body-shape and granular (e.g., dirt) interaction between the mechanism and the environment. Therefore, the intellectual merit of this work is to advance the design and evaluation of gaits for complex systems by representing complex shapes as a basis of curvature functions, while all along empirically deriving from biological observation linear relationships between these parameters and the resulting displacement in granular media. Calculations will then take minutes rather than the days needed for multi-particle discrete element method (DEM) simulation, mitigating the challenges inherent in performing many experiments on real mechanical systems. This work will contribute to a new understanding of biological locomotors as well as help create life-life locomotion in mechanical systems.

这项努力旨在了解和制定有效运动的策略，以实现生物和合成机车系统。步态是动物运动的基本方面。例子包括一匹马的步行，鱼的笔触和蛇的滑行。在这些动作中，动物经历了与周围环境相互作用的循环运动，以在每个循环中获得净位移。这种步态的功效表明它们在机械系统的运动中构成了核心能力。了解基于步态的运动原理提供了两个机会：深入了解生物过程，并创建复杂的合成运动，以将机械系统发送到危险和肮脏的环境中。为了获得这种见解，出现问题：如何对运动进行建模，并使用此模型，如何评估和设计步态以获得所需的机车能力？在这个项目中，重点将放在有限的运动上，包括蛇，细长蜥蜴，细菌，精子和线虫蠕虫。将开发用于封闭空间应用的有限型运动控制器，例如在崩溃的建筑物和滑坡碎片中进行搜救。但是，使用几何工具的许多先前工作提供了设计步态的计算繁重方法：选择步态的参数化基础功能，模拟系统的运动，然后优化输入参数以找到满足设计要求的步态。使用正向模拟的优化在计算上是昂贵的。此外，现有的几何方法忽略了现实世界的考虑，例如身体形状和颗粒状（例如，污垢）之间的相互作用。因此，这项工作的智力优点是通过将复杂形状表示为曲率函数的基础来推进对复杂系统的步态的设计和评估，而沿经验依赖于这些参数之间的生物学观察线性关系以及在粒状培养基中产生的位移。然后，计算将需要几分钟而不是多粒子离散元素方法（DEM）仿真所需的天数，从而减轻对实际机械系统进行许多实验所固有的挑战。这项工作将有助于对生物运动的新理解，并有助于在机械系统中创造生命生活。