The National Science Foundation awarded a three-year $629,951 project grant to Georgia Tech Research Corporation under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.049) to investigate mechanical intelligence and locomotion in slender organisms navigating complex terrain. The grant aims to discover how active closed-loop control and passive mechanically intelligent control mechanisms interact to enable goal-oriented movement in organisms like rice and nematode roots and...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) project grant under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) aims to develop the world's smallest functional bipedal robot, multi-legged robot, and wheeled robot, each approximately 100 times smaller than the current state-of-the-art. The $854,461 award to Carnegie Mellon University, spanning from September 1, 2024 to August 31, 2027, will establish scaling laws to understand how actuation, joint losses, and contact properties change at smaller scales. This...
The National Science Foundation awarded a two-year, $138,000 Project Grant to support research titled "Parallel Evolution of Lizards in Urban Heat Islands: Locomotor Performance, Muscle Physiology, and Gene Regulation." The grant falls under the NSF's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), which aims to promote progress in the biological sciences and strengthen the national scientific enterprise through increased knowledge and understanding of major problems confronting the nation....
This $769,770 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) will fund research at Ball State University from September 2022 through August 2025. The research aims to develop rigorous mathematical models describing the coordinated changes in form and function that occur through ontogeny in arboreal lizards. Researchers will conduct biomechanical experiments and morphological analysis on mourning geckos and three additional arboreal...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) Project Grant award under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) supports research to enable insect-scale legged robots with climbing and object grasping capabilities through the investigation of capillary adhesion and lubrication principles. The $325,497 award, made to President and Fellows of Harvard College, aims to develop analytical models, control methods, and demonstrations for reliable vertical climbing and robust grasping of irregular objects by...
The National Science Foundation awarded a $572,149 project grant to the Regents of the University of California at Riverside under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041). The grant will support research from March 2021 to February 2026 on developing morphological computation techniques for resilient dynamic locomotion of compliant legged robots. This has applications for precision agriculture. The Engineering program seeks to improve quality of life and economic strength by fostering innovation...
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $323,345 Project Grant under its Integrative Activities (CFDA 47.083) program to the University of New Haven. The grant supports the acquisition of a legged robotic platform to conduct research and education on risk-aware automated exploration of unknown hazardous environments, with applications for automated search and rescue operations. The research will explore techniques such as real-time object dynamics estimation, natural language...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) Project Grant award under the NSF Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) provides $421,935 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop an insect-scale quadrupedal robot with advanced climbing and grasping capabilities. The key objectives of this 3-year project, starting January 1, 2025, are to: (1) develop analytical models of adhesion and lubrication principles to enable inverted and vertical climbing with feedback control; and (2) demonstrate...
This $629,806 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) funds experimental, numerical, and robotic research into the role of dynamic load sensing in legged locomotion. West Virginia University will conduct the research from October 2021 through September 2025. As part of the effort, Marshall University will receive a sub-award to perform $629k neurophysiology experiments on insects at its facilities and in collaboration with the University of Cologne,...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) Project Grant award of $874,489 to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst will support research to enable bipedal humanoid robots to rapidly navigate hazardous and unstructured environments, such as those encountered during search and rescue operations after natural disasters. The key objectives are to: (1) develop an event camera-based pose tracking framework for accurate real-time pose estimation during rapid robot...