Exploring and Exploiting Nonlinearity in Small-Scale Robots

This fellowship tackles traditional barriers between control engineering and small-scale robotics (i.e., the robots in millimetre and micrometre scales): as the size of the robot decreases, the physics that governs their modes of operation (also called dynamical responses) changes dramatically, requiring novel control methods. For example, a micro-robot needs to change its mode of operation from walking to crawling to cross a tunnel, enabling it to reach into narrow and vulnerable environments. The great obstacle to its practical deployment is that nonlinear effects, such as friction and collision, are essential for its motion, but these nonlinearities are poorly understood for effective control. This fellowship will create new approaches to modelling, analysing, and controlling nonlinearities in small-scale robots, in turn opening potential for their applications, such as for medical interventions and environmental exploration. It will create fundamental methods that can be applied to different small-scale robots by other researchers and engineers. This work will focus on a particular scene: a small-scale robot moving in the gut. The long-term vision of this fellowship is to develop small-scale robots that exploit nonlinear mechanical effects to enhance their locomotion and control while operating in complex difficult-to-access environments. The unique research approach of this fellowship, a joint effort of numerical and experimental studies, will be hosted by Prof. Yang Liu from the University of Exeter (UNEXE) with the secondment supervisor, Prof. Matthieu Fruchard from the University of Orléans (UOR), and the consulting gastroenterologist, Dr Shyam Prasad, from the Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.