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We successfully evolved a neural network controller that produces dynamic walking in a simulated bipedal robot with compliant actuators, a difficult control problem. The evolutionary evaluation uses a detailed software simulation of a…
Collective animal movements produce spectacular natural phenomena that arise from simple local interactions among group members. Flocks of homing pigeons, Columba livia, provide a useful model for the study of collective motion and decision…
Neural systems show a modular and typically also a hierarchical organisation across different levels and across different species. Topology relates to function, but it is also influences dynamics as earlier studies showed its effect on…
Starting from a simple animal-biology example, a general, somewhat counter-intuitive property of diffusion random walks is presented. It is shown that for any (non-homogeneous) purely diffusing system, under any isotropic uniform incidence,…
This study focuses on the velocity patterns of various body parts during walking and proposes a method for evaluating gait symmetry. Traditional motion analysis studies have assessed gait symmetry based on differences in electromyographic…
Humans experience small fluctuations in their gait when walking on uneven terrain. The fluctuations deviate from the steady, energy-minimizing pattern for level walking, and have no obvious organization. But humans often look ahead when…
Spider walks are systems of interacting particles. The particles move independently as long as their movement do not violate some given rules describing the relative position of the particles; moves that violate the rules are not realized.…
Path integration is a navigation strategy widely observed in nature where an animal maintains a running estimate of its location during an excursion. Evidence suggests it is both ancient and ubiquitous in nature. Over the past century or…
Locomotion is a prime example for adaptive behavior in animals and biological control principles have inspired control architectures for legged robots. While machine learning has been successfully applied to many tasks in recent years, Deep…
We present an imitation learning framework that extracts distinctive legged locomotion behaviors and transitions between them from unlabeled real-world motion data. By automatically discovering behavioral modes and mapping user steering…
Understanding the dynamical behavior of complex systems from their underlying network architectures is a long-standing question in complexity theory. Therefore, many metrics have been devised to extract network features like motifs,…
Central pattern generators (CPGs), with a basis is neurophysiological studies, are a type of neural network for the generation of rhythmic motion. While CPGs are being increasingly used in robot control, most applications are hand-tuned for…
In this letter, we formulate a novel Markov Decision Process (MDP) for safe and data-efficient learning for humanoid locomotion aided by a dynamic balancing model. In our previous studies of biped locomotion, we relied on a low-dimensional…
Achieving stable bipedal walking on surfaces with unknown motion remains a challenging control problem due to the hybrid, time-varying, partially unknown dynamics of the robot and the difficulty of accurate state and surface motion…
We present a real-time pattern generator for dynamic walking over rough terrains. Our method automatically finds step durations, a critical issue over rough terrains where they depend on terrain topology. To achieve this level of…
For humanoids to be deployed in demanding situations, such as search and rescue, highly intelligent decision making and proficient sensorimotor skill is expected. A promising solution is to leverage human prowess by interconnecting robot…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Natural selection for terrestrial locomotion has yielded unifying patterns in the body shape of legged animals, often manifesting as scaling laws. One such pattern appears in the frontal aspect ratio. Smaller animals like insects typically…
Animal telemetry data are often analysed with discrete time movement models assuming rotation in the movement. These models are defined with equidistant distant time steps. However, telemetry data from marine animals are observed…
Living creatures exhibit a remarkable diversity of locomotion mechanisms, evolving structures specialised for interacting with their environment. In the vast majority of cases, locomotor behaviours such as flying, crawling, and running, are…