Related papers: Continuous body 3-D reconstruction of limbless ani…
Snakes can traverse almost all types of environments by bending their elongate bodies in 3-D to interact with the terrain. Similarly, a snake robot is a promising platform to perform critical tasks in various environments. Understanding how…
Reconstructing the 3D geometry, pose, and motion of animals is a long-standing problem, which has a wide range of applications, from biology, livestock management, and animal conservation and welfare to content creation in digital…
Terrestrial locomotion requires generating appropriate ground reaction forces which depend on substrate geometry and physical properties. The richness of positions and orientations of terrain features in the 3-D world gives limbless animals…
Limbless terrestrial animals exhibit exceptional locomotor versatility and control, currently unmatched by engineered counterparts. Here, we introduce a computational framework that enables soft synthetic snakes to navigate unstructured,…
Many animals, modern aircraft, and underwater vehicles use streamlined body shapes that reduce fluid dynamic drag to achieve fast and effective locomotion in air and water. Similarly, numerous small terrestrial animals move through…
Snakes can move through almost any terrain. Similarly, snake robots hold the promise as a versatile platform to traverse complex environments like earthquake rubble. Unlike snake locomotion on flat surfaces which is inherently stable, when…
Reorientation (turning in plane) plays a critical role for all robots in any field application, especially those that in confined spaces. While important, reorientation remains a relatively unstudied problem for robots, including limbless…
Although typically possessing four limbs and short bodies, lizards have evolved a diversity of body plans, from short-bodied and fully-limbed to elongate and nearly limbless. Such diversity in body morphology is hypothesized as adaptations…
We optimize three-dimensional snake kinematics for locomotor efficiency. We assume a general space-curve representation of the snake backbone with small-to-moderate lifting off the ground and negligible body inertia. The cost of locomotion…
Motivated by a possible convergence of terrestrial limbless locomotion strategies ultimately determined by interfacial effects, we show how both 3D gait alterations and locomotory adaptations to heterogeneous terrains can be understood…
Accurately estimating the 3D pose and shape is an essential step towards understanding animal behavior, and can potentially benefit many downstream applications, such as wildlife conservation. However, research in this area is held back by…
3D shape reconstruction typically requires identifying object features or textures in multiple images of a subject. This approach is not viable when the subject is semi-transparent and moving in and out of focus. Here we overcome these…
Tracking mouse body parts in video is often incomplete due to occlusions such that - e.g. - subsequent action and behavior analysis is impeded. In this conceptual work, videos from several perspectives are integrated via global exterior…
Can freely moving humans or animals themselves serve as calibration targets for multi-camera systems while simultaneously estimating their correspondences across views? We humans can solve this problem by mentally rotating the observed 2D…
We tackle the problem of monocular 3D reconstruction of articulated objects like humans and animals. We contribute DensePose 3D, a method that can learn such reconstructions in a weakly supervised fashion from 2D image annotations only.…
Limbless locomotors, from microscopic worms to macroscopic snakes, traverse complex, heterogeneous natural environments typically using undulatory body wave propagation. Theoretical and robophysical models typically emphasize body…
3D representation and reconstruction of human bodies have been studied for a long time in computer vision. Traditional methods rely mostly on parametric statistical linear models, limiting the space of possible bodies to linear…
Despite advances in a diversity of environments, snake robots are still far behind snakes in traversing complex 3-D terrain with large obstacles. This is due to a lack of understanding of how to control 3-D body bending to push against…
Recent technological developments have spurred great advances in the computerized tracking of joints and other landmarks in moving animals, including humans. Such tracking promises important advances in biology and biomedicine. Modern…
Snake moves across various terrains by bending its elongated body. Recent studies discovered that snakes can use vertical bending to traverse terrain of large height variation, such as horizontally oriented cylinders, a wedge (Jurestovsky,…