Julian Tao
Associate Professor, School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment
Junliang (Julian) Tao is an associate professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University. His research focuses on Bio-inspired Geotechnics (BiG). His current research topics include include bio-inspired burrowing mechanisms and robots, bio-inspired geosystems, smart and sustainable geosystems and soil behavior.
Tao has been researching the effective and highly efficient self-burrowing mechanisms of animals — looking at their varied subterranean locomotive abilities. His idea wins him an NSF CAREER Award titled "CAREER: Integrated Research and Education on Bio-Inspired Burrowing".
Now he is also extending this research to a new collaborative project to design and develop below-ground sensing networks using robots that mimic burrowing animals and plants. In 2018, Tao earned support from a National Science Foundation Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research Signals in the Soil award to develop “paradigm-shifting platform technology” for “self-boring robots” from which the next generation of underground wireless sensing networks can be launched (with Daniel Aukes and Hamidreza Marvi).
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We are developing smart burrowing robots that can autonomously burrow into the ground, sense their environment, and characterize soil properties. This research involves design, rapid prototyping, laboratory experiments using a robotic arm, robotics control, and data analytics.