Related papers: Key principle of the efficient running, swimming, …
Responding mechanically to environmental requests, muscles show a surprisingly large variety of functions. The studies of in vivo cycling muscles qualified skeletal muscles into four principal locomotor patterns: motor, brake, strut, and…
Muscles are biological actuators extensively studied in the frame of Hill's classic empirical model as isolated biomechanical entities, which hardly applies to a living organism subjected to physiological and environmental constraints. Here…
Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on centralized processors. We introduce a rapid and autonomous…
The problem of biped locomotion at steady speeds is discussed through a Lagrangian formulation developed for velocity-dependent, body driving forces. Human walking on a level surface is analyzed in terms of the data on the resultant…
Scaling laws illuminate Nature's fundamental biological principles and guide bioinspired materials and structural designs. In simple cases they are based on the fundamental principle that all laws of nature remain unchanged (i.e.,…
A key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non-human animal species have provided evidence for…
We review the observations and the basic laws describing the essential aspects of collective motion -- being one of the most common and spectacular manifestation of coordinated behavior. Our aim is to provide a balanced discussion of the…
The cohesive collective motion (flocking, swarming) of autonomous agents is ubiquitously observed and exploited in both natural and man-made settings, thus, minimal models for its description are essential. In a model with continuous space…
An organism's ability to move freely is a fundamental behaviour in the animal kingdom. To understand animal locomotion requires a characterisation of the material properties, as well as the biomechanics and physiology. We present a…
Active particles contain internal degrees of freedom with the ability to take in and dissipate energy and, in the process, execute systematic movement. Examples include all living organisms and their motile constituents such as molecular…
The principle of least action provides a holistic worldview in which nature in its entirety and every detail is pictured in terms of actions. Each and every action is ultimately composed of one or multiples of the most elementary action…
The levels of agility and flight or swimming performance demonstrated by insects, birds, fish, and even some aquatic invertebrates, are often vastly superior to what even the most advanced human-engineered vehicles operating in the same…
Minimising the energy consumption associated with periodic motion is a priority common to a wide range of technologies and organisms - among them, many species of flying insect, for which flapping-wing flight is a life-essential mode of…
This paper proposes a variational approach to describe the evolution of organization of complex systems from first principles, as increased efficiency of physical action. Most simply stated, physical action is the product of the energy and…
We study the efficiency of sliding locomotion for three-link bodies in the presence of dry (Coulomb) friction. Friction coefficient space can be partitioned into several regions, each with distinct types of efficient kinematics. These…
Cell motility in viscous fluids is ubiquitous and affects many biological processes, including reproduction, infection, and the marine life ecosystem. Here we review the biophysical and mechanical principles of locomotion at the small…
Efficient locomotion is important for the evolution of complex life, yet the physical principles selecting specific swimming strokes often remain entangled with biological constraints. In viscous fluids, the scallop theorem constrains the…
The biomechanics of the human body gives subjects a high degree of freedom in how they can execute movement. Nevertheless, subjects exhibit regularity in their movement patterns. One way to account for this regularity is to suppose that…
Many previous studies of sliding locomotion have assumed that body inertia is negligible. Here we optimize the kinematics of a three-link body for efficient locomotion and include among the kinematic parameters the temporal period of…
We use immobility as an origin and reference for the measurement of locomotor behavior; speed, the direction of walking and the direction of facing as the three degrees of freedom shaping fly locomotor behavior, and cocaine as the parameter…