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Walking animals, like stick insects, cockroaches or ants, demonstrate a fascinating range of locomotive abilities and complex behaviors. The locomotive behaviors can consist of a variety of walking patterns along with adaptation that allow…
Our understanding of the neural basis of locomotor behavior can be informed by careful quantification of animal movement. Classical descriptions of legged locomotion have defined discrete locomotor gaits, characterized by distinct patterns…
Quadrupeds transition spontaneously to various gait patterns (e.g., walk, trot, pace, gallop) in response to the locomotion speed. The generation of these gait patterns has been the subject of debate for a long time. We propose a coupled…
Legged locomotion involves various gaits. It has been observed that fast running insects (cockroaches) employ a tripod gait with three legs lifted off the ground simultaneously in swing, while slow walking insects (stick insects) use a…
In this paper, we consider the problem of adapting a dynamically walking bipedal robot to follow a leading co-worker while engaging in tasks that require physical interaction. Our approach relies on switching among a family of Dynamic…
Robot controllers are often optimised for a single robot in a single environment. This approach proves brittle, as such a controller will often fail to produce sensible behavior for a new morphology or environment. In comparison, animal…
Quadruped animal locomotion emerges from the interactions between the spinal central pattern generator (CPG), sensory feedback, and supraspinal drive signals from the brain. Computational models of CPGs have been widely used for…
Animals locomote for various reasons: to search for food, find suitable habitat, pursue prey, escape from predators, or seek a mate. The grand scale of biodiversity contributes to the great locomotory design and mode diversity. Various…
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…
In our previous work, we studied an interconnected bursting neuron model for insect locomotion, and its corresponding phase oscillator model, which at high speed can generate stable tripod gaits with three legs off the ground simultaneously…
Even the simplest of animals exhibit behavioral sequences with complex temporal dynamics. Prominent amongst the proposed organizing principles for these dynamics has been the idea of a hierarchy, wherein the movements an animal makes can be…
This paper presents a Discrete-Time Model Predictive Controller (MPC) for humanoid walking with online footstep adjustment. The proposed controller utilizes a hierarchical control approach. The high-level controller uses a low-dimensional…
Stick insect stepping patterns have been studied for insights about locomotor rhythm generation and control, because the underlying neural system is relatively accessible experimentally and produces a variety of rhythmic outputs. Harnessing…
Central Pattern Generators (CPGs) form the neural basis of the observed rhythmic behaviors for locomotion in legged animals. The CPG dynamics organized into networks allow the emergence of complex locomotor behaviors. In this work, we take…
Humans can balance very well during walking, even when perturbed. But it seems difficult to achieve robust walking for bipedal robots. Here we describe the simplest balance controller that leads to robust walking for a linear inverted…
In human crowds, interactions among individuals give rise to a variety of self-organized collective motions that help the group to effectively solve the problem of coordination. However, it is still not known exactly how humans adjust their…
It is well known that animals can use neural and sensory feedback via vision, tactile sensing, and echolocation to negotiate obstacles. Similarly, most robots use deliberate or reactive planning to avoid obstacles, which relies on prior…
Human beings and other vertebrates show remarkable performance and efficiency in locomotion, but the functioning of their biological control systems for locomotion is still only partially understood. The basic patterns and timing for…
The intersection of ground reaction forces near a point above the center of mass has been observed in computer simulation models and human walking experiments. Observed so ubiquitously, the intersection point (IP) is commonly assumed to…
This work developed a learning framework for perceptive legged locomotion that combines visual feedback, proprioceptive information, and active gait regulation of foot-ground contacts. The perception requires only one forward-facing camera…