Related papers: Sea star inspired crawling and bouncing
Locomotion is a prime example for adaptive behavior in animals and biological control principles have inspired control architectures for legged robots. While machine learning has been successfully applied to many tasks in recent years, Deep…
In the last few years, there have been many new developments and significant accomplishments in the research of bionic robot fishes. However, in terms of swimming performance, existing bionic robot fishes lag far behind fish, prompting…
It has been a long-standing problem how schooling fish optimize their motion by exploiting the vortices shed by the others. A recent experimental study showed that a pair of fish reduce energy consumption by matching the phases of their…
Aquatic creatures exhibit remarkable adaptations of their body to efficiently interact with the surrounding fluid. The tight coupling between their morphology, motion, and the environment are highly complex but serves as a valuable example…
We study two microswimmers consisting of a spherical rigid head and a passive elastic tail. In the first one the tail is clamped to the head, and the system oscillates under the action of an external torque. In the second one, head and tail…
A recently developed theory of stochastic swimming is used to study the notion of coherence in active systems that couple via hydrodynamic interactions. It is shown that correlations between various modes of deformation in stochastic…
We introduce a novel musculoskeletal model of a dog, procedurally generated from accurate 3D muscle meshes. Accompanying this model is a motion capture-based locomotion task compatible with a variety of control algorithms, as well as an…
Biological systems perform an astonishing array of dynamical processes -- including development and repair, regulation, behavior and motor control, sensing and signaling, and adaptation, among others. Powered by the transduction of stored…
We review how sensorimotor control is dictated by interacting neural populations, optimal feedback mechanisms, and the biomechanics of bodies. First, we outline the distributed anatomical loops that shuttle sensorimotor signals between…
Pedestrian trajectory prediction is crucial for many important applications. This problem is a great challenge because of complicated interactions among pedestrians. Previous methods model only the pairwise interactions between pedestrians,…
Deformable substrates such as sand and mud present significant challenges for terrestrial robots due to complex robot-terrain interactions. Inspired by mudskippers, amphibious animals that naturally adjust their tail morphology and movement…
Living systems are capable of locomotion, reconfiguration, and replication. To perform these tasks, cells spatiotemporally coordinate the interactions of force-generating, "active" molecules that create and manipulate non-equilibrium…
Many organisms navigate gradients by alternating straight motions (runs) with random reorientations (tumbles), transiently suppressing tumbles whenever attractant signal increases. This induces a functional coupling between movement and…
The richness of many complex systems stems from the interactions among their components. The higher-order nature of these interactions, involving many units at once, and their temporal dynamics constitute crucial properties that shape the…
There is a recent surge of interest in the behavior of active particles that can at the same time align their direction of movement and synchronize their oscillations, known as swarmalators. While theoretical and numerical models of such…
Activity can organize matter in unique configurations inaccessible to equilibrium systems, including a sundry of spiraling shapes seen in nature that range from galaxies to living tissues to fossilized stromatolites. How these dynamic yet…
A propagating "beam" triggering a local phase transition in a nematic elastomer sets it into a crawling motion, which may morph due to buckling. We consider the motion of the various configurations of slender rods and thin stripes with both…
Self-propelled particles with hydrodynamic interactions (microswimmers) have previously been shown to produce long-range ordering phenomena. Many theoretical explanations for these collective phenomena are connected to instabilities in the…
In legged locomotion, the relationship between different gait behaviors and energy consumption must consider the full-body dynamics and the robot control as a whole, which cannot be captured by simple models. This work studies the robot…
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…