Related papers: Thermodynamics of animal locomotion
The metabolic processes complexity is at the heart of energy conversion in living organisms and forms a huge obstacle to develop tractable thermodynamic metabolism models. By raising our analysis to a higher level of abstraction, we develop…
Empirical observations indicate striking similarities among locomotion in terrestrial animals, birds, and fish, but unifying physical grounds are lacking. When applied to efficient locomotion, the analytical mechanics principle of minimum…
An organism's ability to move freely is a fundamental behaviour in the animal kingdom. To understand animal locomotion requires a characterisation of the material properties, as well as the biomechanics and physiology. We present a…
The process of protein folding from an unfolded state to a biologically active, folded conformation is governed by many parameters e.g the sequence of amino acids, intermolecular interactions, the solvent, temperature and chaperon…
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…
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…
Human movements are physical processes combining the classical mechanics of the human body moving in space and the biomechanics of the muscles generating the forces acting on the body under sophisticated sensory-motor control. One way to…
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…
We are motivated by a study that seeks to better understand the dynamic relationship between muscle activation and paw position during locomotion. For each gait cycle in this experiment, activation in the biceps and triceps is measured…
Prior studies have produced models to predict metabolic rates based on experimental observations of isolated muscle contraction from various species. Such models can provide reliable predictions of metabolic rates in humans if muscle…
The physics of behavior seeks simple descriptions of animal behavior. The field has advanced rapidly by using techniques in low dimensional dynamics distilled from computer vision. Yet, we still do not generally understand the rules which…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
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…
We analyze, from the thermodynamical point of view, mechanical systems in which there is production of mechanical energy due to an internal source of energy, and compare that analysis with the similar one for the "symmetric" motion which…
A simple harmonic oscillator model is proposed to describe the mechanical power involved in human locomotion. In this framework, by taking into account the anthropometric parameters of a standard individual, we are able to calculate the…
Legged locomotion is commonly studied and expressed as a discrete set of gait patterns, like walk, trot, gallop, which are usually treated as given and pre-programmed in legged robots for efficient locomotion at different speeds. However,…
The origin and shape of metabolic scaling has been controversial since Kleiber found that basal metabolic rate of animals seemed to vary as a power law of their body mass with exponent 3/4, instead of 2/3, as a surface-to-volume argument…
A novel model of thermal regulation of homoeothermic animals has been implemented. The model is based on a non-equilibrium thermodynamic approach which introduces entropy balance and the rate of entropy generation as a formulation of The…
Muscles consume metabolic energy (ATP) to produce force. A mathematical model for energy expenditure can be useful in estimating real-time costs of movements or to predict energy optimal movements. Metabolic cost models developed so far…
The distinction between the damping coefficient and the effective non-linear mobility of driven particles in active micro-rheology of supercooled liquids is explained in terms of individual and collective dynamics. The effective mobility…