Locomotion over granular terrain poses significant challenges for autonomous robotic systems, particularly in coastal regions characterized by loose, shifting sands. These sandy surfaces exhibit unpredictable behaviour, alternating between solid-like and fluid-like states, making movement across them particularly difficult. Ensuring reliable mobility on such terrains is essential for tasks like environmental monitoring, infrastructure inspection, and search-and-rescue missions. This thesis presents a simulation-aided design approach to develop a soft, shape-adapting, wheeled locomotion system optimized for sandy terrains. A co-simulation framework combining the discrete element method (DEM) and multibody dynamics (MBD) is employed to simulate the locomotion of a wheeled robot on varying sandy soils, covering both dry and wet sandy soil conditions. DEM models individual sand particles and their contact interactions, while MBD captures the robot’s motion and mechanical behaviour. Using this approach, a shape-adapting wheel was designed with inflatable soft elements placed between rigid lugs. The inflation state changes the wheel geometry, allowing it to adapt to different terrain conditions. The wheel can transform between a lugged configuration for increased traction and a circular configurations for smoother travel. The robot prototype, built around this wheel concept, was evaluated in simulations on various sandy soils, including dry, wet, and very wet sand. Additionally, the prototype was evaluated in simulations on different terrain configurations, such as slopes and obstacles. Simulation results demonstrate improved performance of the shape-adapting wheels across a variety of sandy terrains, including slopes and obstacles. Integrating softness into the wheel improves obstacle climbing performance, while a lugged wheel configuration performs particularly well on loose, dry sandy slopes. Overall, the DEMMBD co-simulation framework offers a powerful tool for evaluating and optimizing robotic locomotion strategies in granular environments. It enables rapid iteration of design configurations without the need for extensive physical prototyping, reducing development time and cost.

To stimulate research and innovation (R&I), to contribute to the solution of societal challenges and to align R&I with societal values, the European Commission has launched the governance framework of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). RRI figures in many high-level EU policies as a means to promote smart growth, and a growing community of R&I practitioners from both the public and private sectors appears committed to it. Although debates on what RRI precisely entails have not reached closure yet, RRI provides an interesting avenue to explore ways of making R&I more societally germane. While recognizing the usefulness of keeping critical reflection on RRI’s meaning alive, we suggest that to make the step from theorizing to implementation, RRI could benefit from a clearer conceptualization. This chapter presents the iterative trajectory in conceptualizing RRI followed as part of RRI Tools, one of a number of EC-funded research projects and support acts aimed at fleshing out what RRI can and should be, and the conceptualization of RRI that this led to. It suggests that RRI is best captured if in R&I governance attention is paid to the five p’s of Purpose, Products, Processes, Preconditions and People, and that further elaborations on the meaning of RRI should happen in dialogue with attempts at practicing RRI.