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Despite contending with constraints imposed by the environment, morphology, and physiology, animals move well by physically interactingwith the environment to use and transition between modes such as running, climbing, and self-righting. By…
Dynamic bipedal robot locomotion has achieved remarkable success due in part to recent advances in trajectory generation and nonlinear control for stabilization. A key assumption utilized in both theory and experiments is that the robot's…
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…
Stability of running on rough terrain depends on the propagation of perturbations due to the ground. We consider stability within the sagittal plane and model the dynamics of running as a two-dimensional body with an alternating aerial and…
Bipeds have demonstrated high agility and mobility in unstructured environments such as sand. The yielding of such granular media brings significant sinkage and slip of the bipedal feet, leading to uncertainty and instability of walking…
Limbless organisms such as snakes can navigate nearly all terrain. In particular, desert-dwelling sidewinder rattlesnakes (Crotalus cerastes) operate effectively on inclined granular media (such as sand dunes) that induce failure in…
Bipedal walking is one of the most important hallmarks of human that robots have been trying to mimic for many decades. Although previous control methodologies have achieved robot walking on some terrains, there is a need for a framework…
The heavy-load legged robot has strong load carrying capacity and can adapt to various unstructured terrains. But the large weight results in higher requirements for motion stability and environmental perception ability. In order to utilize…
Self-propelling organisms locomote via generation of patterns of self-deformation. Despite the diversity of body plans, internal actuation schemes and environments in limbless vertebrates and invertebrates, such organisms often use similar…
Animals are capable of precise and agile locomotion using vision. Replicating this ability has been a long-standing goal in robotics. The traditional approach has been to decompose this problem into elevation mapping and foothold planning…
Snakes can traverse almost all types of environments by bending their elongate bodies in 3-D to interact with the terrain. Similarly, a snake robot is a promising platform to perform critical tasks in various environments. Understanding how…
Recently, reinforcement learning has become a promising and polular solution for robot legged locomotion. Compared to model-based control, reinforcement learning based controllers can achieve better robustness against uncertainties of…
Synthetic bio-molecular spiders with "legs" made of single-stranded segments of DNA can move on a surface which is also covered by single-stranded segments of DNA complementary to the leg DNA. In experimental realizations, when a leg…
Rapid transduction of sensory stimulation to action is essential for an animal to survive. To this end, most animals use the sub-second excitable and multistable dynamics of a neuromuscular system. Here, studying an animal without neurons…
It is well known that animals can use neural and sensory feedback via vision, tactile sensing, and echolocation to negotiate obstacles. Similarly, most robots use deliberate or reactive planning to avoid obstacles, which relies on prior…
Small animals and robots must often rapidly traverse large bump-like obstacles when moving through complex 3-D terrains, during which, in addition to leg-ground contact, their body inevitably comes into physical contact with the obstacles.…
We optimize three-dimensional snake kinematics for locomotor efficiency. We assume a general space-curve representation of the snake backbone with small-to-moderate lifting off the ground and negligible body inertia. The cost of locomotion…
Undulatory locomotion, a gait in which thrust is produced in the opposite direction of a traveling wave of body bending, is a common mode of propulsion used by animals in fluids, on land, and even within sand. As such it has been an…
The capability of effectively moving on complex terrains such as sand and gravel can empower our robots to robustly operate in outdoor environments, and assist with critical tasks such as environment monitoring, search-and-rescue, and…
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…