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Multimodal locomotion is crucial for an animal's adaptability in unstructured wild environments. Similarly, in the human gastrointestinal tract, characterized by viscoelastic mucus, complex rugae, and narrow sphincters like the cardia,…
In the context of legged robots, adaptive behavior involves adaptive balancing and adaptive swing foot reflection. While adaptive balancing counteracts perturbations to the robot, adaptive swing foot reflection helps the robot to navigate…
Thanks to recent technological advances, it is now possible to track with an unprecedented precision and for long periods of time the movement patterns of many living organisms in their habitat. The increasing amount of data available on…
Inchworm crawling allows for both quasistatic and dynamic gaits at a wide range of actuation frequencies. This locomotion mechanism is common in nonskeletal animals and exploited extensively in the bio-inspired field of soft robotics. In…
In collective motion, perceptually-limited individuals move in an ordered manner, without centralized control. The perception of each individual is highly localized, as is its ability to interact with others. While natural collective motion…
Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…
Humanoid robots deployed in industrial environments are required to perform load-carrying transportation tasks that tightly couple locomotion and manipulation. However, achieving stable and robust locomotion under varying payloads and…
Many living and artificial systems show a similar emergent behavior and collective motions on different scales, starting from swarms of bacteria to synthetic active particles, herds of mammals and crowds of people. What all these systems…
The neural dynamics of the nematode C. elegans are experimentally low-dimensional and correspond to discrete behavioral states, where previous modeling work has found neural proxies for some of these states. Experimental results further…
Modularisation, repetition, and symmetry are structural features shared by almost all biological neural networks. These features are very unlikely to be found by the means of structural evolution of artificial neural networks. This paper…
With the rise of modern deep learning, neural networks have become an essential part of virtually every artificial intelligence system, making it difficult even to imagine different models for intelligent behavior. In contrast, nature…
Faced with strong demand for robots working in underwater pipeline environments, a novel underwater multi-model locomotion robot is designed and studied in this research. By mimicking the earthworm's metameric body, the robot is segmented…
The field of bio-inspired robotics seeks to create mechanical systems that mimic the designs and concepts used by biological systems. One of the more challenging biological concepts to imitate in mechanical systems is the ability to create…
Nematodes have evolved to swim in highly viscous environments. Artificial mechanisms that mimic the locomotory functions of nematodes can be efficient viscous pumps. We experimentally simulate the motion of the head segment of…
To enable the broad adoption of wearable robotic exoskeletons in medical and industrial settings, it is crucial they can adaptively support large repertoires of movements. We propose a new human-machine interface to simultaneously drive…
Robots are still poor at traversing cluttered large obstacles required for important applications like search and rescue. By contrast, animals are excellent at doing so, often using direct physical interaction with obstacles rather than…
Undulatory locomotion, as seen in the nematode \emph{Caenorhabditis elegans}, is a common swimming gait of organisms in the low Reynolds number regime, where viscous forces are dominant. While the nematode's motility is expected to be a…
Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…
We present Neural-Swarm2, a learning-based method for motion planning and control that allows heterogeneous multirotors in a swarm to safely fly in close proximity. Such operation for drones is challenging due to complex aerodynamic…