Related papers: Friction modulation in limbless, three-dimensional…

Polymorphism in the peripheral sensory system (e.g., congenital individual differences in photopigment configuration) is important in diverse research fields, ranging from evolutionary biology to engineering, because of its potential…

Dynamics simulation with frictional contacts is important for a wide range of applications, from cloth simulation to object manipulation. Recent methods using smoothed lagged friction forces have enabled robust and differentiable simulation…

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…

We tackle the problem of perceptive locomotion in dynamic environments. In this problem, a quadrupedal robot must exhibit robust and agile walking behaviors in response to environmental clutter and moving obstacles. We present a…

Legged locomotion is commonly studied and expressed as a discrete set of gait patterns, like walk, trot, gallop, which are usually treated as given and pre-programmed in legged robots for efficient locomotion at different speeds. However,…

Animal locomotion is often subject to constraints arising from anatomical/physiological asymmetries. We use the nematode C.~elegans as a minimal model system to ask whether such constraints might shape locomotion patterns optimized during…

We present experimental and numerical results for a model crawler which is able to extract net positional changes from reciprocal shape changes, i.e. 'breathing-like' deformations, thanks to directional, frictional interactions with a…

Robots are becoming increasingly essential for traversing complex environments such as disaster areas, extraterrestrial terrains, and marine environments. Yet, their potential is often limited by mobility and adaptability constraints. In…

The relationship between physiological systems and modern electromechanical technologies is fast becoming intimate with high degrees of complex interaction. It can be argued that muscular function, limb movements, and touch perception serve…

Bone adapts in response to its mechanical environment. This evolution of bone density is one of the most important mechanisms for developing fracture resistance. A finite element framework for simulating bone adaptation, commonly called…

Soft lubricated contacts exhibit complex interfacial behaviours governed by the coupled effects of multiscale surface roughness and non-linear fluid-solid interactions. Accurately capturing this interplay across thin-film flows is…

We investigate the effects of heterogeneous (spatially varying) activity in a hydrodynamical model for dense bacterial suspensions, confining ourselves to experimentally realizable, simple, quenched, activity patterns. We show that the…

Recently, reinforcement learning has become a promising and polular solution for robot legged locomotion. Compared to model-based control, reinforcement learning based controllers can achieve better robustness against uncertainties of…

We investigate grokking in transformers through the lens of inductive bias: dispositions arising from architecture or optimization that let the network prefer one solution over another. We first show that architectural choices such as the…

Recent advances in human mobility research have revealed consistent pairwise characteristics in movement behavior, yet existing mobility models often overlook the spatial and topological structure of mobility networks. By analyzing millions…

Continuous neural field models with inhomogeneous synaptic connectivities are known to support traveling fronts as well as stable bumps of localized activity. We analyze stationary localized structures in a neural field model with periodic…

In this note we introduce a hierarchy of phase spaces for static friction, which give a graphical way to systematically quantify the directional dependence in static friction via subregions of the phase spaces. We experimentally plot these…

Rotating Snakes is a visual illusion in which a stationary design is perceived to move dramatically. In the current study, the mechanism that generates perception of motion was analyzed using a combination of psychophysics experiments and…

Efficient navigation in swarms often relies on the emergence of decentralized approaches that minimize traversal time or energy. Stigmergy, where agents modify a shared environment that then modifies their behavior, is a classic mechanism…

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate, in an experimental facility consisting of a simple pendular device, the performance of a sliding mode adaptive position-feedback tracking controller of mechanical systems with friction reported in…