Chen Li

Chen Li
Johns Hopkins University | JHU · Department of Mechanical Engineering

PhD

About

47
Publications
21,050
Reads
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2,337
Citations
Introduction
I am an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Analogous to aero- and hydrodynamics, my lab is working to advance a new field of terradynamics, to understand animal locomotion and improve robotic mobility in complex terrains common in the real world. Learn more at http://li.me.jhu.edu.
Additional affiliations
January 2016 - present
Johns Hopkins University
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
Description
  • https://li.me.jhu.edu/
July 2012 - December 2015
University of California, Berkeley
Position
  • PostDoc Position
August 2005 - May 2012
Georgia Institute of Technology
Position
  • PhD student and Postdoctoral Fellow
Education
August 2005 - December 2011
Georgia Institute of Technology
Field of study
  • Physics
September 2001 - July 2005
Peking University
Field of study
  • Physics

Publications

Publications (47)
Preprint
Full-text available
Many applications require robots to move through terrain with large obstacles, such as self-driving, search and rescue, and extraterrestrial exploration. Although robots are already excellent at avoiding sparse obstacles, they still struggle in traversing cluttered obstacles. Inspired by cockroaches that use and respond to physical interaction with...
Article
Full-text available
Terrestrial locomotion requires generating appropriate ground reaction forces which depend on substrate geometry and physical properties. The richness of positions and orientations of terrain features in the 3-D world gives limbless animals like snakes that can bend their body versatility to generate forces from different contact areas for propulsi...
Article
Full-text available
Snakes can bend their elongate bodies in various forms to traverse various environments. We understand well how snakes use lateral body bending to push against asperities on flat ground for propulsion, and snake robots can do so effectively. However, snakes can also use vertical bending to push against uneven terrain of large height variation for p...
Article
Full-text available
Animals and robots must self-right on the ground after overturning. Biology research described various strategies and motor patterns in many species. Robotics research devised many strategies. However, we do not well understand how the physical principles of how the need to generate mechanical energy to overcome the potential energy barrier governs...
Article
Full-text available
Outside laboratory conditions and human-made structures, animals rarely encounter flat surfaces. Instead, natural substrates are uneven surfaces with height variation that ranges from the microscopic scale to the macroscopic scale. For walking animals (which we define as encompassing any form of legged movement across the ground, such as walking, r...
Article
Full-text available
A challenge to understanding locomotion in complex 3-D terrain with large obstacles is to create tools for controlled, systematic experiments. Recent terrain arenas allow observations at small spatiotemporal scales (∼10 body length or cycles). Here, we create a terrain treadmill to enable high-resolution observation of animal locomotion through lar...
Article
Full-text available
To traverse complex terrain, animals often transition between locomotor modes. It is well-known that locomotor transitions can be induced by switching in neural control circuits or driven by a need to minimize metabolic energetic cost. Recent work discovered that locomotor transitions in complex 3-D terrain cluttered with large obstacles can emerge...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Robots excel at avoiding obstacles but struggle to traverse complex 3-D terrain with cluttered large obstacles. By contrast, insects like cockroaches excel at doing so. Recent research in our lab elucidated how locomotor transitions emerge from locomotor-environment interaction for diverse locomotor challenges abstracted from complex 3-D terrain an...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Despite advances in a diversity of environments, snake robots are still far behind snakes in traversing complex 3-D terrain with large obstacles. This is due to a lack of understanding of how to control 3-D body bending to push against terrain features to generate and control propulsion. Biological studies suggested that generalist snakes use conta...
Article
Full-text available
Robotic spacecrafts have helped expand the reach for many planetary exploration missions. Most ground mobile planetary exploration robots use wheeled or modified wheeled platforms. Although extraordinarily successful at completing intended mission goals, because of the limitations of wheeled locomotion, they have been largely limited to benign, sol...
Article
Full-text available
Terrestrial animals must self-right when overturned on the ground, but this locomotor task is strenuous. To do so, the discoid cockroach often pushes its wings against the ground to begin a somersault which rarely succeeds. As it repeatedly attempts this, the animal probabilistically rolls to the side to self-right. During winged self-righting, the...
Article
Full-text available
To traverse complex three-dimensional terrain with large obstacles, animals and robots must transition across different modes. However, most mechanistic understanding of terrestrial locomotion concerns how to generate and stabilize near-steady-state, single-mode locomotion (e.g. walk, run). We know little about how to use physical interaction to ma...
Article
Full-text available
Robots still struggle to dynamically traverse complex 3D terrain with many large obstacles, an ability required for many critical applications. Body–obstacle interaction is often inevitable and induces perturbation and uncertainty in motion that challenges closed-form dynamic modeling. Here, inspired by recent discovery of a terradynamic streamline...
Article
Full-text available
Limbless animals such as snakes, limbless lizards, worms, eels, and lampreys move their slender, long body in three dimensions to traverse diverse environments. Accurately quantifying their continuous body's 3-D shape and motion is important for understanding body-environment interaction in complex terrain, but this is difficult to achieve (especia...
Article
Full-text available
The last five years marked a surge in interest for and use of smart robots, which operate in dynamic and unstructured environments and might interact with humans. We posit that well-validated computer simulation can provide a virtual proving ground that in many cases is instrumental in understanding safely, faster, at lower costs, and more thorough...
Article
Full-text available
Randomness is common in biological and artificial systems, resulting either from stochasticity of the environment or noise in organisms or devices themselves. In locomotor control, randomness is typically considered a nuisance. For example, during dynamic walking, randomness in stochastic terrain leads to metastable dynamics, which must be mitigate...
Article
Full-text available
Animals and robots must right themselves after flipping over on the ground. The discoid cockroach pushes its wings against the ground in an attempt to dynamically self-right by a somersault. However, because this maneuver is strenuous, the animal often fails to overcome the potential energy barrier and makes continual attempts. In this process, the...
Article
Full-text available
Significance Effective locomotion in nature happens by transitioning across multiple modes (e.g., walk, run, climb). Using laboratory experiments on a model system, we demonstrate that an energy landscape approach helps understand how multipathway transitions across locomotor modes in complex 3D terrain statistically emerge from physical interactio...
Article
Full-text available
When legged animals and robots move on granular substrates such as loose sand, their legs may sink below the terrain, rowing and paddling within the granular media. However, conventional leg-ground contact models such as elastic and elastoplastic models are unavailable to describe the rotary interaction of penetrated legs which is affected by the f...
Article
Full-text available
Snakes can move through almost any terrain. Similarly, snake robots hold the promise as a versatile platform to traverse complex environments like earthquake rubble. Unlike snake locomotion on flat surfaces which is inherently stable, when snakes traverse complex terrain by deforming their body out of plane, it becomes challenging to maintain stabi...
Article
Full-text available
Snakes can move through almost any terrain. Although their locomotion on flat surfaces using planar gaits is inherently stable, when snakes deform their body out of plane to traverse complex terrain, maintaining stability becomes a challenge. On trees and desert dunes, snakes grip branches or brace against depressed sand for stability. However, how...
Article
Full-text available
Terrestrial animals often must self-right from an upside-down orientation on the ground to survive. Here, we compared self-righting strategies of the Madagascar hissing, American, and discoid cockroaches on a challenging flat, rigid, low-friction surface to quantify the mechanical principles. All three species almost always self-righted (97% probab...
Article
Full-text available
Many snakes live in deserts, forests and river valleys and traverse challenging 3-D terrain such as rocks, felled trees and rubble, with obstacles as large as themselves and variable surface properties. By contrast, apart from branch cantilevering, burrowing, swimming and gliding, laboratory studies of snake locomotion have focused on locomotion on...
Article
Full-text available
It is well known that animals can use neural and sensory feedback via vision, tactile sensing, and echolocation to negotiate obstacles. Similarly, most robots use deliberate or reactive planning to avoid obstacles, which relies on prior knowledge or high-fidelity sensing of the environment. However, during dynamic locomotion in complex, novel, 3D t...
Article
Full-text available
Small animals and robots must often rapidly traverse large bump-like obstacles when moving through complex 3D terrains, during which, in addition to leg-ground contact, their body inevitably comes into physical contact with the obstacles. However, we know little about the performance limits of large bump traversal and how body-terrain interaction a...
Article
Full-text available
Terrestrial animals and robots are susceptible to flipping-over during rapid locomotion in complex terrains. However, small robots are less capable of self-righting from an upside-down orientation compared to small animals like insects. Inspired by the winged discoid cockroach, we designed a new robot that opens its wings to self-right by pushing a...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Animals and robots alike face challenges of flipping-over as they move in complex terrain. Small insects like cockroaches can rapidly right themselves when upside down, yet small fast-running legged robots are much less capable of ground-based self-righting. Inspired by the discoid cockroach that opens its wings to push against the ground to self-r...
Article
Full-text available
In this review we argue for the creation of a physics of moving systems -- a locomotion "robophysics" -- which we define as the pursuit of the discovery of principles of self generated motion. Robophysics can provide an important intellectual complement to the discipline of robotics, largely the domain of researchers from engineering and computer s...
Article
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Many animals, modern aircraft, and underwater vehicles use fusiform, streamlined body shapes that reduce fluid dynamic drag to achieve fast and effective locomotion in air and water. Similarly, numerous small terrestrial animals move through cluttered terrain where three-dimensional, multi-component obstacles like grass, shrubs, vines, and leaf lit...
Article
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Inspired by the exoskeletons of insects, we have developed a number of manufacturing methods for the fabrication of structures for attachment, protection, and sensing. This manufacturing paradigm is based on infrared laser machining of lamina and the bonding of layered structures. The structures have been integrated with an inexpensive palm-sized l...
Article
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Physicists and colleagues from various disciplines are just beginning to study how organisms and robots move within and on granular media. An old theory from fluid mechanics can help guide them.
Chapter
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Papers from a flagship conference reflect the latest developments in the field, including work in such rapidly advancing areas as human-robot interaction and formal methods. Robotics: Science and Systems VIII spans a wide spectrum of robotics, bringing together contributions from researchers working on the mathematical foundations of robotics, robo...
Article
Full-text available
We study the locomotor mechanics of a small, lightweight robot (DynaRoACH, 10 cm, 25 g) which can move on a granular substrate of 3 mm diameter glass particles at speeds up to 5 body length/s, approaching the performance of certain desert-dwelling animals. To reveal how the robot achieves this performance, we used high-speed imaging to capture its...
Article
Full-text available
Walking on Sand Studies of objects moving through air or water have provided detailed models for designing objects with better flow dynamics. Examples include aircraft fins and wings, robots used as underwater probes, and even swimsuits to enhance swimmers' competitiveness. Much less is known about the mechanics of moving objects on or in materials...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Compared to agile legged animals, wheeled and tracked vehicles often suffer large performance loss on granular surfaces like sand and gravel. Understanding the mechanics of legged locomotion on granular media can aid the development of legged robots with improved mobility on granular surfaces; however, no general force model yet exists for granular...
Article
Full-text available
A diversity of animals that run on solid, level, flat, non-slip surfaces appear to bounce on their legs; elastic elements in the limbs can store and return energy during each step. The mechanics and energetics of running in natural terrain, particularly on surfaces that can yield and flow under stress, is less understood. The zebra-tailed lizard (C...
Chapter
Full-text available
Granular media (GM) present locomotor challenges for terrestrial and extraterrestrial devices because they can flow and solidify in response to localized intrusion of wheels, limbs and bodies. While the development of airplanes and submarines is aided by understanding of hydrodynamics, fundamental theory does not yet exist to describe the complex i...
Article
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We present an experimental and computer simulation study of a small, light-weight, biologically inspired robot running on a model granular medium (GM), 3 mm diameter glass particles. The six-legged RoACH robot (10 cm long, 25 grams) utilizes an alternating tripod gait to run at speeds up to 25 cm/sec. Forward speed increases with increasing limb fr...
Article
Full-text available
Achieving effective locomotion on diverse terrestrial substrates can require subtle changes of limb kinematics. Biologically inspired legged robots (physical models of organisms) have shown impressive mobility on hard ground but suffer performance loss on unconsolidated granular materials like sand. Because comprehensive limb–ground interaction mod...
Article
Full-text available
Terrestrial locomotion can take place on complex substrates such as leaf litter, debris, and soil that flow or solidify in response to stress. While principles of movement in air and water are revealed through study of the hydrodynamic equations of fluid motion, discovery of principles of movement in complex terrestrial environments is less advance...
Article
Full-text available
The design of robots able to locomote effectively over a diversity of terrain requires detailed ground interaction models; unfortunately such models are lacking due to the complicated response of real world substrates which can yield and flow in response to loading. To advance our understanding of the relevant modeling and design issues, we conduct...
Article
Full-text available
Swimming Through Sand Although composed of solid particles, sand can behave like a fluid. If you had to swim through sand, how would you do it? Would you use your arms and legs for propulsion or would you make your body as compact as possible and try to wiggle and slither your way through? Maladen et al. (p. 314 ) used x-ray imaging to study the mo...
Article
Full-text available
Legged locomotion on flowing ground (e.g., granular media) is unlike locomotion on hard ground because feet experience both solid- and fluid-like forces during surface penetration. Recent bioinspired legged robots display speed relative to body size on hard ground comparable with high-performing organisms like cockroaches but suffer significant per...

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