Related papers: Parallel locomotor control strategies in mice and …
Handedness in humans - better performance using either the left or right hand - is personally familiar, moderately heritable, and regulated by many genes, including those involved in general body symmetry. But behavioral handedness, i.e.…
Like a rocket being propelled into space, evolution has engineered flies to launch into adulthood via multiple stages. Flies develop and deploy two distinct bodies, linked by the transformative process of metamorphosis. The fly larva is a…
We use immobility as an origin and reference for the measurement of locomotor behavior; speed, the direction of walking and the direction of facing as the three degrees of freedom shaping fly locomotor behavior, and cocaine as the parameter…
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…
Computational models are critical to advance our understanding of how neural, biomechanical, and physical systems interact to orchestrate animal behaviors. Despite the availability of near-complete reconstructions of the Drosophila…
Although typically possessing four limbs and short bodies, lizards have evolved a diversity of body plans, from short-bodied and fully-limbed to elongate and nearly limbless. Such diversity in body morphology is hypothesized as adaptations…
Limbless locomotors, from microscopic worms to macroscopic snakes, traverse complex, heterogeneous natural environments typically using undulatory body wave propagation. Theoretical and robophysical models typically emphasize body…
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…
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…
We introduce a novel musculoskeletal model of a dog, procedurally generated from accurate 3D muscle meshes. Accompanying this model is a motion capture-based locomotion task compatible with a variety of control algorithms, as well as an…
In this paper, we describe an approach to achieve dynamic legged locomotion on physical robots which combines existing methods for control with reinforcement learning. Specifically, our goal is a control hierarchy in which highest-level…
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…
Most animals possess the ability to actuate a vast diversity of movements, ostensibly constrained only by morphology and physics. In practice, however, a frequent assumption in behavioral science is that most of an animal's activities can…
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…
Animals possess a remarkable ability to navigate challenging terrains, achieved through the interplay of various pathways between the brain, central pattern generators (CPGs) in the spinal cord, and musculoskeletal system. Traditional…
Terrestrial animals must often negotiate heterogeneous, varying environments. Accordingly, their locomotive strategies must adapt to a wide range of terrain, as well as to a range of speeds in order to accomplish different behavioral goals.…
Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on centralized processors. We introduce a rapid and autonomous…
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…
Amphibious legged robots inspired by salamanders are promising in applications in complex amphibious environments. However, despite the significant success of training controllers that achieve diverse locomotion behaviors in conventional…
Although commonly associated with limbless animals like snakes and fish, multi-legged organisms like centipedes also utilize undulatory locomotion. Whether these undulations are actively reinforced or resisted by the axial musculature…