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Handedness in humans - better performance using either the left or right hand - is personally familiar, moderately heritable, and regulated by many genes, including those involved in general body symmetry. But behavioral handedness, i.e.…
Microorganisms such as algae and bacteria move in a viscous environment with extremely low Reynolds ($Re$), where the viscous drag dominates the inertial forces. They have adapted to this environment by developing specialized features such…
Centipede-like robots offer unique locomotion advantages due to their small cross-sectional area for accessing confined spaces, and their redundant legs enhance robustness in cluttered environments such as search-and-rescue and pipe…
Legged robots leverage ground contacts and the reaction forces they provide to achieve agile locomotion. However, uncertainty coupled with contact discontinuities can lead to failure, especially in real-world environments with unexpected…
Locomotion on granular slopes such as sand dunes remains a fundamental challenge for legged robots due to reduced shear strength and gravity-induced anisotropic yielding of granular media. Using a hexapedal robot on a tiltable granular bed,…
Variable stiffness is a key capability in biological and robotic systems, enabling adaptive interaction across tasks and environments. Mechanical metamaterials offer an alternative to conventional mechatronic solutions by encoding stiffness…
The functional demands of robotic systems often require completing various tasks or behaviors under the effect of disturbances or uncertain environments. Of increasing interest is the autonomy for dynamic robots, such as multirotors, motor…
In the fields of robotics and biomechanics, the integration of elastic elements such as springs and tendons in legged systems has long been recognized for enabling energy-efficient locomotion. Yet, a significant challenge persists:…
Robots will become ubiquitously useful only when they can use few attempts to teach themselves to perform different tasks, even with complex bodies and in dynamical environments. Vertebrates, in fact, successfully use trial-and-error to…
Random perturbations applied in tandem to an ensemble of oscillating objects can synchronize their motion. We study multiple copies of an arbitrary dynamical system in a stable limit cycle, described via a standard phase reduction picture.…
In collective motion, perceptually-limited individuals move in an ordered manner, without centralized control. The perception of each individual is highly localized, as is its ability to interact with others. While natural collective motion…
Nature suggests that exploiting the elasticities and natural dynamics of robotic systems could increase their locomotion efficiency. Prior work on elastic snake robots supports this hypothesis, but has not fully exploited the nonlinear…
Stable locomotion in precipitous environments is an essential task for quadruped robots, requiring the ability to resist various external disturbances. Recent neural policies enhance robustness against disturbances by learning to resist…
The goal of this work is the development of a motion model for sequentially timed movement actions in robotic systems under specific consideration of temporal stabilization, that is maintaining an approximately constant overall movement…
A distinctive feature of quadrupeds that is integral to their locomotion is the tail. Tails serve many purposes in biological systems including propulsion, counterbalance, and stabilization while walking, running, climbing, or jumping.…
Real-time constraint satisfaction for robots can be quite challenging due to the high computational complexity that arises when accounting for the system dynamics and environmental interactions, often requiring simplification in modelling…
Robotic mobility in microgravity is necessary to expand human utilization and exploration of outer space. Bio-inspired multi-legged robots are a possible solution for safe and precise locomotion. However, a dynamic motion of a robot in…
Disorder plays a critical role in signal transport, by controlling the correlation of systems. In wave physics, disordered potentials suppress wave transport due to their localized eigenstates from random-walk scattering. Although the…
To traverse complex natural terrain, animals often transition between locomotor modes. It is well known that locomotor transitions can be induced by switching in neural control circuits or be driven by a need to minimize metabolic energetic…
In robotics motion is often described from an external perspective, i.e., we give information on the obstacle motion in a mathematical manner with respect to a specific (often inertial) reference frame. In the current work, we propose to…