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Walking on natural terrain like soil and rock is a challenging problem that has been approached from a variety of strategies such as using sophisticated control methods, compliant legs, and compliant feet. In this paper we explore how to modify granular jamming feet for walking applications by adding stabilizing internal structures. Previous work has explored how granular jamming technology can be used to create compliant and stiffness changing feet that enable locomotion over a diverse range of natural terrain by allowing robot feet to conform around 3D multicomponent terrain such as wood chips and gravel and stiffen, preventing slip. To date, no work has been done to tune granular jamming feet for the specific application of walking. We show that adding internal structures to granular jamming membranes can increase the force they are able to resist without slipping by 1.5x while maintaining their ability to conform around obstacles. When attached to a robot, we see increases in speed of up to 1.4x, decreases in the duty cycle necessary to reach desired foot trajectories of up to 5%, and increases in traction force of up to 1.2x over a diverse set of natural terrain. 

Small ground‐based robots show promise for locomotion on complex surfaces. A critical application area for such robots is movement over complex terrain and within constricted space such as narrow gaps in rubble. To contend with this terrain complexity, robots typically require high degree‐of‐freedom (DOF) limbs. However, for small robot platforms, this approach of high DOF legs is impractical due to actuator limitations. This presents an opportunity to design robots whose morphology enables the outsourcing of computational tasks to the robot body through the use of compliant elements (morphological computation). Herein, a novel robot appendage is developed that can passively compress in a programmed direction in response to environmental constrictions. A robot equipped with these appendages can enter narrow spaces down to 72% of the robot's sprawled body width as well as low ceilings down to 68% its freestanding height. The robot is able to step onto and over small terrain features ( hip height) and navigate various natural terrain types with ease. The results show that these compressible appendages enable versatile robot locomotion for robot exploration in previously unmapped environments.