Related papers: Excitable mechanics embodied in a walking cilium
Stylized models of the neurodynamics that underpin sensory motor control in animals are proposed and studied. The voluntary motions of animals are typically initiated by high level intentions created in the primary cortex through a…
Inspired by animals that co-adapt their brain and body to interact with the environment, we present a tendon-driven and over-actuated (i.e., n joint, n+1 actuators) bipedal robot that (i) exploits its backdrivable mechanical properties to…
Previous experiments [M. J. Coleman and A. Ruina, Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 3658 (1998)] showed that a gravity-powered toy with no control and which has no statically stable near-standing configurations can walk stably. We show here that a…
Cilia are ubiquitous organelles involves in eukaryotic motility. They are long, slender, and motile protrusions from the cell body. They undergo active regular oscillatory beating patterns that can propel cells, such as the algae…
Habituation - a phenomenon in which a dynamical system exhibits a diminishing response to repeated stimulations that eventually recovers when the stimulus is withheld - is universally observed in living systems from animals to unicellular…
Motile cilia beat in an asymmetric fashion in order to propel the surrounding fluid. When many cilia are located on a surface, their beating can synchronise such that their phases form metachronal waves. Here, we computationally study a…
Contact inhibition plays a crucial role in the motility of cells, the process of wound healing, and the formation of tumors. By mimicking the mechanical motion of calls crawling on a substrate using a pseudopod, we constructed a minimal…
Cilia and flagella in biological systems often show large scale cooperative behaviors such as the synchronization of their beats in "metachronal waves". These are beautiful examples of emergent dynamics in biology, and are essential for…
An organism's ability to move freely is a fundamental behaviour in the animal kingdom. To understand animal locomotion requires a characterisation of the material properties, as well as the biomechanics and physiology. We present a…
We present a nonlinear stochastic model of the human gait control system in a variety of gait regimes. The stride interval time series in normal human gait is characterized by slightly multifractal fluctuations. The fractal nature of the…
Ciliary oscillations driven by molecular motors cause fluid motion at micron scale. Stable oscillations require a substantial source of dissipation to balance the energy input of motors. Conventionally, it stems from external fluid. We…
Constructing physical models of living cells and tissues is an extremely challenging task because of the high complexities of both intra- and intercellular processes. In addition, the force that a single cell generates vanishes in total due…
Biological systems are robust to perturbations at both the genetic and environmental levels. Yet, these same perturbations can elicit variation in behavior. The interplay between functional robustness and behavioral variability is…
Organisms use hair-like cilia that beat in a metachronal fashion to actively transport fluid and suspended particles. Metachronal motion emerges due to a phase difference between beating cycles of neighboring cilia and appears as traveling…
The spontaneous generation of electrical activity underpins a number of essential physiological processes, and is observed even in tissues where specialized pacemaker cells have not been identified. The emergence of periodic oscillations in…
Quadrupedal animals employ diverse galloping strategies to optimize speed, stability, and energy efficiency. However, the biomechanical mechanisms that enable adaptive gait transitions during high-speed locomotion under load remain poorly…
Contractility in animal cells is often generated by molecular motors such as myosin, which require polar substrates for their function. Motivated by recent experimental evidence of motor-independent contractility, we propose a robust…
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…
Here we numerically study a model of excitable media, namely, a network with occasionally quiet nodes and connection weights that vary with activity on a short-time scale. Even in the absence of stimuli, this exhibits unstable dynamics,…
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,…