Related papers: The dog-and-rabbit chase problem
The Lambert problem consists in connecting two given points in a given lapse of time under the gravitational influence of a fixed center. While this problem is very classical, we are concerned here with situations where friction forces act…
A lot of research activity has recently taken place around the chase procedure, due to its usefulness in data integration, data exchange, query optimization, peer data exchange and data correspondence, to mention a few. As the chase has…
Animals such as rabbits and birds can instantly generate locomotion behavior in reaction to a dynamic, approaching object, such as a person or a rock, despite having possibly never seen the object before and having limited perception of the…
Humans are highly adept at walking in environments with foot placement constraints, including stepping-stone scenarios where the footstep locations are fully constrained. Finding good solutions to stepping-stone locomotion is a longstanding…
Typical models of learning assume incremental estimation of continuously-varying decision variables like expected rewards. However, this class of models fails to capture more idiosyncratic, discrete heuristics and strategies that people and…
Although rare, collisions of two or more bodies in the N-body problem are apparent obstacles at which Newton's Law of Gravity ceases to make sense. Without understanding the nature of collisions, a complete understanding of the N-body…
For robots to be useful outside labs and specialized factories we need a way to teach them new useful behaviors quickly. Current approaches lack either the generality to onboard new tasks without task-specific engineering, or else lack the…
We study an emerging problem named "grasping the invisible" in robotic manipulation, in which a robot is tasked to grasp an initially invisible target object via a sequence of pushing and grasping actions. In this problem, pushes are needed…
We introduce a problem set-up we call the Iterated Matching Pennies (IMP) game and show that it is a powerful framework for the study of three problems: adversarial learnability, conventional (i.e., non-adversarial) learnability and…
The control problem of the working tool movement along a predefined trajectory is considered. The integral of kinetic energy and weighted inertia forces for the whole period of motion is considered as a cost functional. The trajectory is…
In this article the pursuit problem of objects that moves with different accelerations and initial speeds is studied. Initially, the situation in which the escaping object moves in a straight line is considered. Under this condition, and if…
Acceleration is a fundamental concept in physics which is taught in mechanics at all levels. Here, we discuss some challenges in teaching this concept effectively when the path along which the object is moving has a curvature and…
Mobile manipulation in dynamic environments is challenging due to movable obstacles blocking the robot's path. Traditional methods, which treat navigation and manipulation as separate tasks, often fail in such 'manipulate-to-navigate'…
Classical second order models of pedestrian dynamics, like the social-force model, suffer from various unrealistic behaviors in the dynamics, e.g. backward motion, oscillations and overlapping of pedestrians. These effects are not related…
Whether there is similarity between two physical processes in the movement of objects and the complexity of behavior is an essential problem in science. How to seek similarity through the adoption of quantitative and qualitative research…
I discuss the influence of adding the air resistance and the kinetic friction to the classical mechanics homework-problem: finding the motion of a body sliding down a hemispherical hill. For a physically realistic ($\propto v^2$) form of…
In this article, we plan to provide an introduction about some basics about robots for readers. Several key topics of classic robotics will be introduced, including robot representation, robot rotational motion, coordinates transformation…
This paper presents a novel incremental learning algorithm for pedestrian motion prediction, with the ability to improve the learned model over time when data is incrementally available. In this setup, trajectories are modeled as simple…
In this paper, we present a general learning framework for controlling a quadruped robot that can mimic the behavior of real animals and traverse challenging terrains. Our method consists of two steps: an imitation learning step to learn…
In this study, we examine introductory physics students' ability to perform analogical reasoning between two isomorphic problems which employ the same underlying physics principles but have different surface features. Three hundred and…