Granular Terrain

Granular terrain research focuses on understanding and interacting with loose, particulate materials like sand and regolith, crucial for robotics in challenging environments such as planetary exploration and construction. Current research emphasizes developing robust algorithms for robot navigation and manipulation in these deformable substrates, employing techniques like simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) with multi-modal sensor fusion, vision transformers for predicting avalanche dynamics, and deep learning for image segmentation and object retrieval. These advancements improve autonomous robot capabilities in unstructured terrains, impacting fields ranging from planetary science to civil engineering through improved navigation, object manipulation, and material characterization.