Simulating Robotic Locomotion in Sand: Resistive Force Theory in an Open-Source Physics Engine
This work integrates 3D Resistive Force Theory (RFT) into MuJoCo to simulate a legged robot walking in sand without modeling individual grains. The resulting RFT-SiM framework successfully captures key trends from physical experiments within 20% accuracy, validating its use as a stable tool for predicting robotic locomotion in granular media.