Overview

The shoe scruffer was developed in the UCSB Cadense Lab to simulate 2,500,000+ steps of variable friction shoes to collect characteristic data as part of a $2.3 million National Institute of Health grant. This test fixture was designed in Solidworks and fabricated in the on-campus machine shop using 80/20 aluminum extrusion and low-carbon steel. The system runs at ~60 RPM with the ability to add weights to create a heavier scruff. Matlab simulations were used to analyze vital metrics in the research paper coming out in ASME in winter 2026.