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Balance control is important for human and bipedal robotic systems. While dynamic balance during locomotion has received considerable attention, quantitative understanding of static balance and falling remains limited. This work presents a…

Human locomotion involves continuously variable activities including walking, running, and stair climbing over a range of speeds and inclinations as well as sit-stand, walk-run, and walk-stairs transitions. Understanding the kinematics and…

Adapting upper-limb impedance (i.e., stiffness, damping, inertia) is essential for humans interacting with dynamic environments for executing grasping or manipulation tasks. On the other hand, control methods designed for state-of-the-art…

Dexterous in-hand manipulation is a unique and valuable human skill requiring sophisticated sensorimotor interaction with the environment while respecting stability constraints. Satisfying these constraints with generated motions is…

Stick insect stepping patterns have been studied for insights about locomotor rhythm generation and control, because the underlying neural system is relatively accessible experimentally and produces a variety of rhythmic outputs. Harnessing…

An accurate estimate of limb position is necessary for movement. Where we localize our unseen hand after a reach depends on felt hand position, or proprioception, but often only predicted sensory consequences based on efference copies of…

A central challenge in building robotic prostheses is the creation of a sensor-based system able to read physiological signals from the lower limb and instruct a robotic hand to perform various tasks. Existing systems typically perform…

Precise and elegant coordination of a prosthesis across many degrees of freedom represents a significant challenge to efficient rehabilitation of people with limb deficiency. Processing the electrical neural signals, collected from the…

Rapid, targeted hand movements exhibit a regular movement pattern described by Fitts law. We develop a model of these movements in which this movement pattern results from an optimal control model describing rapid hand movements and a…

Ankle push-off largely contributes to limb energy generation in human walking, leading to smoother and more efficient locomotion. Providing this net positive work to an amputee requires an active prosthesis, but has the potential to enable…

Performing a grasp is a pivotal capability for a robotic gripper. We propose a new evaluation approach of grasping stability via constructing a model of grasping stiffness based on the theory of contact mechanics. First, the mathematical…

In this paper we study the controlled motion of an arbitrary two-dimensional body in an ideal fluid with a moving internal mass and an internal rotor in the presence of constant circulation around the body. We show that by changing the…

Neural-based, data-driven analysis and control of dynamical systems have been recently investigated and have shown great promise, e.g. for safety verification or stability analysis. Indeed, not only do neural networks allow for an entirely…

Posture is an essential aspect of motor behavior, necessitating continuous muscle activation to counteract gravity. It remains stable under perturbation, aiding in maintaining bodily balance and enabling movement execution. Similarities…

Beyond providing accurate movements, achieving smooth motion trajectories is a long-standing goal of robotics control theory for arms aiming to replicate natural human movements. Drawing inspiration from biological agents, whose reaching…

Cortical activity in-vivo displays relaxational time scales much longer than the membrane time constant of the neurons or the deactivation time of ionotropic synaptic conductances. The mechanisms responsible for such slow dynamics are not…

Frictional contact has been extensively studied as the core underlying behavior of legged locomotion and manipulation, and its nearly-discontinuous nature makes planning and control difficult even when an accurate model of the robot is…

The nonlinear mechanics of a flexible elastic rod constrained at its edges by a pair of sliding sleeves is analyzed. The planar equilibrium configurations of this variable-length elastica are found to have shape defined only by the…

We outline a method for controlling the location of stable and unstable manifolds in the following sense. From a known location of the stable and unstable manifolds in a steady two-dimensional flow, the primary segments of the manifolds are…

Stability is a basic requirement when studying the behavior of dynamical systems. However, stabilizing dynamical systems via reinforcement learning is challenging because only little data can be collected over short time horizons before…