Related papers: Excitable mechanics embodied in a walking cilium
Filamentous cyanobacteria can show fascinating examples of nonequilibrium self-organization, which however are not well-understood from a physical perspective. We investigate the motility and collective organization of colonies of these…
In this paper we study crawling locomotion based on directional frictional interactions, namely, frictional forces that are sensitive to the sign of the sliding velocity. Surface interactions of this type are common in biology, where they…
In motor neuroscience, artificial recurrent neural networks models often complement animal studies. However, most modeling efforts are limited to data-fitting, and the few that examine virtual embodied agents in a reinforcement learning…
Neuronal dynamics is intrinsically unstable, producing activity fluctuations that are essentially scale-free. Here we show that while these scale-free fluctuations are independent of temporal input statistics, they can be entrained by input…
Active particles such as swimming bacteria or self-propelled colloids are known to spontaneously organize into fascinating large-scale dynamic structures. The emergence of these collective states from the motility pattern of the individual…
Collective motion is found in various animal systems, active suspensions and robotic or virtual agents. This is often understood using high level models that directly encode selected empirical features, such as co-alignment and cohesion.…
Recurrent neural network-based reinforcement learning systems are capable of complex motor control tasks such as locomotion and manipulation, however, much of their underlying mechanisms still remain difficult to interpret. Our aim is to…
In the brain, both neurons and glial cells work in conjunction with each other during information processing. Stimulation of neurons can cause calcium oscillations in astrocytes which in turn can affect neuronal calcium dynamics. The…
Foot slip is a major source of instability in bipedal locomotion on low-friction or uncertain terrain. Standard control approaches typically assume no-slip contact and therefore degrade when slip occurs. We propose a control framework that…
Cortical activity in-vivo displays relaxational time scales much longer than the membrane time constant of the neurons or the deactivation time of ionotropic synaptic conductances. The mechanisms responsible for such slow dynamics are not…
Rectilinear crawling locomotion is a primitive and common mode of locomotion in slender, soft-bodied animals. It requires coordinated contractions that propagate along a body that interacts frictionally with its environment. We propose a…
In living cells, cycles of formation and dissolution of liquid droplets can mediate biological functions such as DNA repair. However, the minimal physicochemical prerequisite for such droplet oscillations remains elusive. Here, we present a…
We study a generic model for the polarisation and motility of self-propelled soft objects, biological cells or biomimetic systems, interacting with a viscous substrate. The active forces generated by the cell on the substrate are modelled…
Over the past few decades, oscillating flexible foils have been used to study the physics of organismal propulsion in different fluid environments. Here we extend this work to a study of flexible foils in a frictional environment. When the…
We extend a recently proposed model (Chaudhuri et al., EPL 87, 20003 (2009)) aiming to describe the formation of fascicles of axons during neural development. The growing axons are represented as paths of interacting directed random walkers…
Sliding friction between two dry surfaces is reasonably described by the speed-independent Amonton-Coulomb friction force law. However, there are many situations where the frictional contact points between two surfaces are "active" and may…
We study the asymptotic behaviour of a family of dynamic models of crawling locomotion, with the aim of characterizing a gait as a limit property. The locomotors, which might have a discrete or continuous body, move on a line with a…
We propose a novel mechanism that propagates vibration through soft twisted beams, taking advantage of dynamically-coupled anisotropic stiffness to simplify the actuation of walking robots. Using dynamic simulation and experimental…
Fluctuations in systems away from thermal equilibrium have features that have no analog in equilibrium systems. One of such features concerns large rare excursions far from the stable state in the space of dynamical variables. For…
Legged locomotion is a challenging task in the field of robotics but a rather simple one in nature. This motivates the use of biological methodologies as solutions to this problem. Central pattern generators are neural networks that are…