Towards metachronal coordination of coupled flexible filaments for terrestrial robot locomotion

Multi-legged autonomous robots are an attractive solution for various applications ranging from health care to military and defense operations in hazardous and inaccessible environments. For a robust and reliable robot operation, it is necessary to have a terrestrial locomotion mechanism that can adapt to unstructured and uncertain workspaces. An approach for designing such a mechanism is to mimic desirable features evolved in biological organisms. Specifically of interest is the emergence of collective beating patterns in coupled arrays of flexible protrusions in various organisms, which are used for locomotion in fluid and terrestrial environments. This paper presents the formulation and simulation of a system of flexible elastic filaments coupled through a solid medium as a simplified model for the locomotion mechanism for a legged terrestrial robot. The base coupling is modeled via linear elastic lumped elements, and metachronal wave patterns are induced upon individual moment actuation. Simulation results pave the ground for future work focused on understanding how to induce sustained metachronal coordination, with the ultimate goal of designing legged robot locomotion.