A wide range of biological systems burrow into the soil for reasons such as feeding, protection, and growth. There are many strategies driven by different environmental factors that enable these organisms to successfully burrow in various substrates including soft, homogeneous/heterogeneous, cohesive soil, granular media, hard and stiff surfaces, etc. The burrowing performance of biological systems inspires researchers to design robotic systems that can burrow and navigate in the soil for purposes such as agricultural monitoring and investigation, space exploration, search and rescue operations, ecological analysis, mining, etc. However, for human-made systems, burrowing introduces a challenging set of problems because of high subterranean resistive drag forces and lift forces.

Gaining an understanding of how biological systems successfully burrow within a variety of media can lead to the development of new kinds of materials, sensors, mechanisms, and robots and opens many possibilities for science and technology to address real-world problems. The goal of this Research Topic is to further our understanding of a variety of biological burrowing strategies and morphologies, biological/engineering materials, bio-inspired technologies (such as sensors, actuators) and approaches that enable successful burrowing in a variety of environments.

In this research topic, we would like to collect recent findings and novel approaches in the field of burrowing biological and robotic systems. This includes, but is not limited to:

- Biological burrowing/digging mechanisms and their robotic counterparts
- Real-time sensing and feedback methods for burrowing/digging
- Burrowing in granular and cohesive media
- Bioinspired soft burrowing robots
- Bioinspired shape-morphing robots for burrowing
- Grand challenges of autonomous subterranean locomotion
- Burrowing in biological and robotic legged systems
- Physics behind burrowing/digging
- Underwater burrowing animals and robots
- Real-world applications of burrowing systems
- Burrowing/digging in the extreme environments
- Novel actuators for burrowing/digging

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Frontiers in Robotics and AI

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