Related papers: The two body problem: proprioception and motor con…
Our understanding of the neural basis of locomotor behavior can be informed by careful quantification of animal movement. Classical descriptions of legged locomotion have defined discrete locomotor gaits, characterized by distinct patterns…
Insects exhibit remarkable cognitive skills in the field and several cognitive abilities have been demonstrated in Drosophila in the laboratory. By devising an ethologically relevant experimental setup that also allows comparison of…
Fluid dynamics, and flight in particular, is a domain where organisms challenge our understanding of its physics. Integrating the current knowledge of animal flight, we propose to revisit the use of live animals to study physical phenomena.…
Flies that walk in a covered planar arena on straight paths avoid colliding with each other, but which of the two flies stops is not random. High-throughput video observations, coupled with dedicated experiments with controlled robot flies…
Flying insects are capable of vision-based navigation in cluttered environments, reliably avoiding obstacles through fast and agile maneuvers, while being very efficient in the processing of visual stimuli. Meanwhile, autonomous micro air…
Evolution and development operate at different timescales; generations for the one, a lifetime for the other. These two processes, the basis of much of life on earth, interact in many non-trivial ways, but their temporal hierarchy --…
It is still not understood how similar genomic sequences have generated diverse and spectacular forms during evolution. The difficulty to bridge phenotypes and genotypes stems from the complexity of multicellular systems, where thousands of…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
Simultaneously evolving morphologies (bodies) and controllers (brains) of robots can cause a mismatch between the inherited body and brain in the offspring. To mitigate this problem, the addition of an infant learning period by the…
Tail bending associated with maneuvering flight of insects is a known phenomenon although there are only a few studies which analyze and quantify the effects and benefits of body configuration changes. We hypothesized that these…
Robot multimodal locomotion encompasses the ability to transition between walking and flying, representing a significant challenge in robotics. This work presents an approach that enables automatic smooth transitions between legged and…
We introduce a method that permits to co-evolve the body and the control properties of robots. It can be used to adapt the morphological traits of robots with a hand-designed morphological bauplan or to evolve the morphological bauplan as…
Developmental processes in multicellular organisms occur far from equilibrium, yet produce complex patterns with astonishing reproducibility. We measure the precision and reproducibility of bilaterally symmetric fly wings across the natural…
In evolutionary robotics, jointly optimising the design and the controller of robots is a challenging task due to the huge complexity of the solution space formed by the possible combinations of body and controller. We focus on the…
Evolving morphologies and controllers of robots simultaneously leads to a problem: Even if the parents have well-matching bodies and brains, the stochastic recombination can break this match and cause a body-brain mismatch in their…
With respect to biological findings underlying fly's physiology in the past decade, we present a directionally selective neural network, with a feed-forward structure and entirely low-level visual processing, so as to implement direction…
The Drosophila larva, a soft-body animal, can bend its body and roll efficiently to escape danger. However, contrary to common belief, this rolling motion is not driven by the imbalance of gravity and ground reaction forces. Through…
How the very first nervous systems evolved remains a fundamental open question. Molecular and genomic techniques have revolutionized our knowledge of the molecular ingredients behind this transition but not yet provided a clear picture of…
Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…
When controllers (brains) and morphologies (bodies) of robots simultaneously evolve, this can lead to a problem, namely the brain & body mismatch problem. In this research, we propose a solution of lifetime learning. We set up a system…