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Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on centralized processors. We introduce a rapid and autonomous…
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…
Optimal nonlinear damping control was recently introduced for the second-order SISO systems, showing some advantages over a classical PD feedback controller. This paper summarizes the main theoretical developments and properties of the…
Snakes' bodies are covered in scales that make it easier to slide in some directions than in others. This frictional anisotropy allows for sliding locomotion with an undulatory gait, one of the most common for snakes. Isotropic friction is…
[...] We argue that the traditional grasp modeling theory assumes a complexity that most robotic hands do not possess and is therefore of limited applicability to the robotic hands commonly used today. We discuss these limitations of the…
Actuating periodically an elastic filament in a viscous liquid generally breaks the constraints of Purcell's scallop theorem, resulting in the generation of a net propulsive force. This observation suggests a method to design simple…
Among the intelligent safety technologies for road vehicles, active suspensions controlled by embedded computing elements for preventing rollover have received a lot of attention. The existing models for synthesizing and allocating forces…
Passive dynamic walkers are widely adopted as a mathematical model to represent biped walking. The stable locomotion of these models is limited to tilted surfaces, requiring gravitational energy. Various techniques, such as actuation…
Robotic Hopping is challenging from the perspective of both modeling the dynamics as well as the mechanical design due to the short period of ground contact in which to actuate on the world. Previous work has demonstrated stable hopping on…
The mutual influence of two layers with strongly loclized electrons is exercised through the random Coulomb shifts of site energies in one layer caused by electron hops in the other layer. We trace how these shifts give rise to a voltage…
Liquid drops slide more slowly over soft, deformable substrates than over rigid solids. This phenomenon can be attributed to the viscoelastic dissipation induced by the moving wetting ridge, which inhibits a rapid motion, and is called…
This paper focuses on the analysis of human gait cycle dynamics and presents a mathematical model to determine the torque exerted on the lower limb joints throughout the complete gait cycle, including its various phases. The study involved…
When a container is set in motion, the free surface of the liquid starts to oscillate or slosh. Such effects can be observed when a glass of water is handled carelessly and the fluid sloshes or even spills over the rims of the container.…
Amphibious legged robots inspired by salamanders are promising in applications in complex amphibious environments. However, despite the significant success of training controllers that achieve diverse locomotion behaviors in conventional…
In the area of bipedal locomotion, the spring loaded inverted pendulum (SLIP) model has been proposed as a unified framework to explain the dynamics of a wide variety of gaits. In this paper, we present a novel analysis of the mathematical…
We describe a family of descent algorithms which generalizes common existing schemes used in applications such as neural network training and more broadly for optimization of smooth functions--potentially for global optimization, or as a…
Dissipative environments are ubiquitous in nature, from microscopic swimmers in low-Reynolds-number fluids to macroscopic animals in frictional media. In this study, motivated by various behaviours of {\it Caenorhabditis elegans} during…
This paper studies bipedal locomotion as a nonlinear optimization problem based on continuous and discrete dynamics, by simultaneously optimizing the remaining step duration, the next step duration and the foot location to achieve…
Despite decades of study, many unknowns exist about the mechanisms governing human locomotion. Current models and motor control theories can only partially capture the phenomenon. This may be a major cause of the reduced efficacy of lower…
In the first part of this thesis, we present our efforts on experimental validation of the predictive performance of mechanics-based mathematical models on a physical one-legged hopping robot platform. We extend upon a recently proposed…