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Legged locomotion is not just about mobility; it also encompasses crucial objectives such as energy efficiency, safety, and user experience, which are vital for real-world applications. However, key factors such as battery power consumption…
In nature, flocking or swarm behavior is observed in many species as it has beneficial properties like reducing the probability of being caught by a predator. In this paper, we propose SELFish (Swarm Emergent Learning Fish), an approach…
Modern ecology has re-emphasized the need for a quantitative understanding of the original 'survival of the fittest theme' based on analyzis of the intricate trade-offs between competing evolutionary strategies that characterize the…
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…
Collective motion inspired by animal groups offers powerful design principles for autonomous aerial swarms. We present a bio-inspired 3D flocking algorithm in which each drone interacts only with a minimal set of influential neighbors,…
In this paper, we wish to investigate the dynamics of information transfer in evolutionary dynamics. We use information theoretic tools to track how much information an evolving population has obtained and managed to retain about different…
Most research on adaptive decision-making takes a strategy-first approach, proposing a method of solving a problem and then examining whether it can be implemented in the brain and in what environments it succeeds. We present a method for…
Natural evolution has produced a tremendous diversity of functional organisms. Many believe an essential component of this process was the evolution of evolvability, whereby evolution speeds up its ability to innovate by generating a more…
Self-organizing complex systems typically are comprised of a large number of frequently similar components or events. Through their process, a pattern at the global-level of a system emerges solely from numerous interactions among the…
Nature is in constant flux, so animals must account for changes in their environment when making decisions. How animals learn the timescale of such changes and adapt their decision strategies accordingly is not well understood. Recent…
Evolution in changing environments is an important, but little studied aspect of the theory of evolution. The idea of adaptive walks in fitness landscapes has triggered a vast amount of research and has led to many important insights about…
We propose an approach of open-ended evolution via the simulation of swarm dynamics. In nature, swarms possess remarkable properties, which allow many organisms, from swarming bacteria to ants and flocking birds, to form higher-order…
To traverse complex three-dimensional terrainwith large obstacles, animals and robots must transition across different modes. However, the most mechanistic understanding of terrestrial locomotion concerns how to generate and stabilize…
Colonies of ants are systems of interacting living organisms in which interactions between individuals and their environment can produce a reliable performance of a complex tasks without the need for centralised control. Particularly…
This paper presents an integrated system for performing precision harvesting missions using a legged harvester. Our harvester performs a challenging task of autonomous navigation and tree grabbing in a confined, GPS denied forest…
Recent research has extended methods from the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics into other disciplines. Most notably, one recent work creates a unified theoretical framework to understand evolutionary biology, machine…
Contact-based decision and planning methods are becoming increasingly important to endow higher levels of autonomy for legged robots. Formal synthesis methods derived from symbolic systems have great potential for reasoning about high-level…
We introduce an idealized model of an intelligent forager in which higher intelligence corresponds to a larger spatial range over which the forager can detect food. Such a forager diffuses randomly whenever the nearest food is more distant…
Proteins evolve through complex sequence spaces, with fitness landscapes serving as a conceptual framework that links sequence to function. Fitness landscapes can be smooth, where multiple similarly accessible evolutionary paths are…
Random walks are powerful tools to analyze spatial-temporal patterns produced by living organisms ranging from cells to humans. At the same time, it is evident that these patterns are not completely random but are results of a convolution…