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Exploring planetary bodies with lower gravity, such as the moon and Mars, allows legged robots to utilize jumping as an efficient form of locomotion thus giving them a valuable advantage over traditional rovers for exploration. Motivated by…
Centipedes exhibit great maneuverability in diverse environments due to their many legs and body-driven control. By leveraging similar morphologies and control strategies, their robotic counterparts also demonstrate effective terrestrial…
Insects have tiny brains but complicated visual systems for motion perception. A handful of insect visual neurons have been computationally modeled and successfully applied for robotics. How different neurons collaborate on motion…
Salamander-like quadruped robots are designed inspired by the skeletal structure of their biological counterparts. However, existing controllers cannot fully exploit these morphological features and largely rely on predefined gait patterns…
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…
Some of the most challenging environments on our planet are accessible to quadrupedal animals but remain out of reach for autonomous machines. Legged locomotion can dramatically expand the operational domains of robotics. However,…
Randomness is common in biological and artificial systems, resulting either from stochasticity of the environment or noise in organisms or devices themselves. In locomotor control, randomness is typically considered a nuisance. For example,…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
The emerging field of optogenetics allows for optical activation or inhibition of neurons and other tissue in the nervous system. In 2005 optogenetic proteins were expressed in the nematode C. elegans for the first time. Since then, C.…
Through natural evolution, nervous systems of organisms formed near-optimal structures to express behavior. Here, we propose an effective way to create control agents, by \textit{re-purposing} the function of biological neural circuit…
Recordings of whole brain activity with single neuron resolution are now feasible in simple organisms. Yet, it is still challenging to appropriately simplify such complex, noisy, and multivariate data in order to reveal general principles…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Efficient operation of intelligent machines in the real world requires methods that allow them to understand and predict the uncertainties presented by the unstructured environments with good accuracy, scalability and generalization,…
Cyborg insects refer to hybrid robots that integrate living insects with miniature electronic controllers to enable robotic-like programmable control. These creatures exhibit advantages over conventional robots in adaption to complex…
Dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over rough terrains reveals remarkable progress over the last few decades. Small-scale quadruped robots are adequately flexible and adaptable to traverse uneven terrains along sagittal direction, such as…
Despite their remarkable advancement in locomotion and manipulation, humanoid robots remain challenged by a lack of synchronized loco-manipulation control, hindering their full dynamic potential. In this work, we introduce a versatile and…
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…
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…
Active systems of self-propelled agents, e.g., birds, fish, and bacteria, can organize their collective motion into myriad autonomous behaviors. Ubiquitous in nature and across length scales, such phenomena are also amenable to artificial…
The physics of behavior seeks simple descriptions of animal behavior. The field has advanced rapidly by using techniques in low dimensional dynamics distilled from computer vision. Yet, we still do not generally understand the rules which…