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The movement of organisms is subject to a multitude of influences of widely varying character: from the bio-mechanics of the individual, over the interaction with the complex environment many animals live in, to evolutionary pressure and…
Recent advances in human mobility research have revealed consistent pairwise characteristics in movement behavior, yet existing mobility models often overlook the spatial and topological structure of mobility networks. By analyzing millions…
We investigate the organization of traffic flow on preexisting uni- and bidirectional ant trails. Our investigations comprise a theoretical as well as an empirical part. We propose minimal models of uni- and bi-directional traffic flow…
Saving energy and enhancing performance are secular preoccupations shared by both nature and human beings. In animal locomotion, flapping flyers or swimmers rely on the flexibility of their wings or body to passively increase their…
Habituation - a phenomenon in which a dynamical system exhibits a diminishing response to repeated stimulations that eventually recovers when the stimulus is withheld - is universally observed in living systems from animals to unicellular…
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…
Insects excel in trajectory and attitude handling during flight, yet the specific kinematic behaviours they use for maintaining stability in air disturbances are not fully understood. This study investigates the adaptive strategies of…
The contribution to an organism's phenotype from one genetic locus may depend upon the status of other loci. Such epistatic interactions among loci are now recognized as fundamental to shaping the process of adaptation in evolving…
We consider a one-dimensional simple symmetric exclusion process in equilibrium, constituting a dynamic random environment for a nearest-neighbor random walk that on occupied/vacant sites has two different local drifts to the right. We…
Contextual policy search allows adapting robotic movement primitives to different situations. For instance, a locomotion primitive might be adapted to different terrain inclinations or desired walking speeds. Such an adaptation is often…
We develop a numerical scheme to determine which planar snake motions are optimal for locomotory efficiency, across a wide range of frictional parameter space. For a large coefficient of transverse friction, we find that retrograde…
Navigating mobile robots through environments shared with humans is challenging. From the perspective of the robot, humans are dynamic obstacles that must be avoided. These obstacles make the collision-free space nonconvex, which leads to…
We propose a model of a one-dimensional random walk in dynamic random environment that interpolates between two classical settings: (I) the random environment is sampled at time zero only; (II) the random environment is resampled at every…
We consider a one-dimensional continuous time random walk with transition rates depending on an underlying autonomous simple symmetric exclusion process starting out of equilibrium. This model represents an example of a random walk in a…
Populations of replicating entities frequently experience sudden or cyclical changes in environment. We explore the implications of this phenomenon via a environmental switching parameter in several common evolutionary dynamics models…
The effects of fluid elasticity on the swimming behavior of the nematode \emph{Caenorhabditis elegans} are experimentally investigated by tracking the nematode's motion and measuring the corresponding velocity fields. We find that fluid…
Common gastropods such as snails crawl on a solid substrate by propagating muscular waves of shear stress on a viscoelastic mucus. Producing the mucus accounts for the largest component in the gastropod's energy budget, more than twenty…
Rapid transduction of sensory stimulation to action is essential for an animal to survive. To this end, most animals use the sub-second excitable and multistable dynamics of a neuromuscular system. Here, studying an animal without neurons…
Essential to each other, growth and exploration are jointly observed in populations, be it alive such as animals and cells or inanimate such as goods and money. But their ability to move, crucial to cope with uncertainty and optimize…
Collective motion in animals and cells often exhibits rapid reorientations and scale-free velocity correlations. This allows information to spread rapidly through the group, allowing an adequate collective response to environmental changes…