A New Form of Peristaltic Locomotion in a Robot – 11062

Earthworms travel by contracting their body segments sequentially.  This method of locomotion is particularly effective in constrained spaces. Soft worm robots may eventually have application in pipe inspection, burrowing, or exploration.  Understanding the physics and control of this motion is a problem we are addressing with mechanical models, mathematics and computer simulation.

http://biorobots.cwru.edu/projects/softworm/