Tangle Robots

A new class of robots made of branching loops in elastic rods.

A simulation of a tangle robot optimized via our method for locomotion speed.
Randomly generated tangle robot geometries using our graph grammar.

These robots are generated by a custom graph grammar based on knot theory. We then optimize over the grammar and control parameters for different use cases.

Publications

  1. tangle_thumbnail.png
    Tangle Robots: A New Class of Elastic Rod Robots
    Sofia Wyetzner, Wing-Sum Law, and Sean Follmer
    In preparation, 2026