He is recognized for his “vine” robots and record-setting jumping robots
On January 14, President Joe Biden awarded UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering associate professor Elliot Hawkes a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding early-career scientists and engineers. Approximately four hundred PECASE awards, which are honorary and do not include additional funding, were given.
“I am incredibly honored to have been selected for this award, and I feel so grateful for everyone at UCSB, NASA, and beyond who has supported my work to make this possible,” Hawkes said several days after receiving the honor. “I look forward to continuing to work with NASA in the coming years.”
PECASE awardees are either employed or funded by any of fourteen participating federal agencies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), under whose auspices Hawkes was recognized for work he completed under a previous NASA Early Career Faculty Award. That award provided funding for two main thrusts of his research: jumping robots for extraterrestrial mobility and root-inspired soft robots for anchoring in low-gravity environments and for subterranean exploration.
In 2021, the jumper reached a record leap for any biological or non-biological entity, reaching a height of 32.9 meters, more than 100 feet. The benefits beyond Earth would be especially notable. Researchers in Hawkes’s lab calculated that, on the Moon, for instance, with its reduced gravity and zero air resistance, the robot could reach a height of 125 meters and travel a half-kilometer forward. Jumping robots could skip over obstacles on a planetary or lunar surface, while also accessing features and aerial perspectives unachievable by terrain-based robots.
Hawkes’s lightweight, tubelike “vine” robots, which unfurl and “grow” by opening and unfolding from the center out, are able to burrow deep into granular media, much like a plant root. Such behavior offers benefits for creating strong anchors in locations where there is little gravity to help start the anchor into the soil. Further, longer versions of the robot equipped with sensors could explore beneath the soil, potentially gathering samples for science missions.