Related papers: The sensorimotor loop as a dynamical system: How r…
The traffic of molecular motors through open tube-like compartments is studied using lattice models. These models exhibit boundary-induced phase transitions related to those of the asymmetric simple exclusion process (ASEP) in one…
In robot swarms operating under highly restrictive sensing and communication constraints, individuals may need to use direct physical proximity to facilitate information exchange. However, in certain task-related scenarios, this requirement…
Robotic locomotion can become efficient when mechanisms exploit passive dynamics, compliance, and resonance rather than track prescribed trajectories. This paper formulates natural locomotion as an exchange principle for systems whose…
Bristle bots are vibration-driven robots actuated by the motion of an internal oscillating mass. Vibrations are translated into directed locomotion due to the alternating friction resistance between robots' bristles and the substrate during…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
Many robot manipulation tasks require the robot to make and break contact with objects and surfaces. The dynamics of such changing-contact robot manipulation tasks are discontinuous when contact is made or broken, and continuous elsewhere.…
This work is part of an effort to understand the neural basis for our visual system's ability, or failure, to accurately track moving visual signals. We consider here a ring model of spiking neurons, intended as a simplified computational…
A spherical robot consists of an externally spherical rigid body rolling on a two-dimensional surface, actuated by an auxiliary mechanism. For a class of actuation mechanisms, we derive a controller for the geometric center of the sphere to…
This paper presents a modular approach to motion planning with provable stability guarantees for robots that move through changing environments via periodic locomotion behaviors. We focus on dynamic walkers as a paradigm for such systems,…
Inspired by spiking neural feedback, we propose a spiking controller for efficient locomotion in a soft robotic crawler. Its bistability, akin to neural fast positive feedback, combined with a sensorimotor slow negative feedback loop,…
We study a system of dynamical units, each of which shows excitable or oscillatory behavior, depending on the choice of parameters. When we couple these units with repressive bonds, we can control the duration of collective oscillations for…
Programming physical intelligence into mechanisms holds great promise for machines that can accomplish tasks such as navigation of unstructured environments while utilizing a minimal amount of computational resources and electronic…
This paper formally defines a robot system, including its sensing and actuation components, as a general, topological dynamical system. The focus is on determining general conditions under which various environments in which the robot can…
With the aim of understanding the emergence of collective motion from local interactions of organisms in a "noisy" environment, we study biologically inspired, inherently non-equilibrium models consisting of self-propelled particles. In…
It is shown that an internal control based on a moving indicator function is able to stabilize the state of parabolic equations evolving in rectangular domains. For proving the stabilizability result, we start with a control obtained from…
Active droplets are artificial microswimmers built from a liquid dispersion by microfluidic tools and showing self-propelled motion. These systems hold particular interest for mimicking biological phenomena, such as some aspects of cell…
We investigate the convergence towards periodic orbits in discrete dynamical systems. We examine the probability that a randomly chosen point converges to a particular neighborhood of a periodic orbit in a fixed number of iterations, and we…
A recently introduced model of coupled non linear oscillators in a ring is revisited in terms of its information processing capabilities. The use of Lempel-Ziv based entropic measures allows to study thoroughly the complex patterns…
Kinetically constrained spin systems play an important role in understanding key properties of the dynamics of slowly relaxing materials, such as glasses. So far kinetic constraints have been introduced in idealised models aiming to capture…
Cyclic pursuit frameworks provide an efficient way to create useful global behaviors out of pairwise interactions in a collective of autonomous robots. Earlier work studied cyclic pursuit with a constant bearing (CB) pursuit law, and has…