IT’S not just humans who find it difficult to run on sand. Even the most nimble robots struggle when faced with a stretch of the white stuff.
Planetary rovers and earthbound rescue robots often need to travel across varying terrain, including sand and rubble. So Daniel Goldman, a biophysicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, investigated what makes these surfaces such a challenge.
His team studied a robot called Sandbot – which has six C-shaped legs and scampers across hard ground with the agility of a cockroach – as it waded through a bath full of poppy seeds.…
