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Biological circuits such as neural or gene regulation networks use internal states to map sensory input to an adaptive repertoire of behavior. Characterizing this mapping is a major challenge for systems biology, and though experiments that…

Elongate limbless robots have the potential to locomote through tightly packed spaces for applications such as search-and-rescue and industrial inspections. The capability to effectively and robustly maneuver elongate limbless robots is…

Brain research has been driven by enquiry for principles of brain structure organization and its control mechanisms. The neuronal wiring map of C. elegans, the only complete connectome available till date, presents an incredible opportunity…

Quantitative models of associative learning that explain the behavior of real animals with high precision have turned out very difficult to construct. We do this in the context of the dynamics of the thermal preference of C. elegans. For…

The locomotion of Caenorhabditis elegans exhibits complex patterns. In particular, the worm combines mildly curved runs and sharp turns to steer its course. Both runs and sharp turns of various types are important components of taxis…

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a well-known model organism used to investigate fundamental questions in biology. Motility assays of this small roundworm are designed to study the relationships between genes and behavior. Commonly,…

Navigating our physical environment requires changing directions and turning. Despite its ecological importance, we do not have a unified theoretical account of non-straight-line human movement. Here, we present a unified optimality…

What fascinates us about animal behavior is its richness and complexity, but understanding behavior and its neural basis requires a simpler description. Traditionally, simplification has been imposed by training animals to engage in a…

Neuromechanics aims to understand the link between an animal's neural activity and its physical behaviors. Recent advances in experimental and machine learning techniques enable simultaneous recordings of neural and locomotion dynamics over…

Nematode species are well-known for their invariant cell lineage pattern during development. Combining knowledge about the fate specification induced by asymmetric division and the anti-correlation between cell cycle length and cell volume…

Reduced motor control is one of the most frequent features associated with aging and disease. Nonlinear and fractal analyses have proved to be useful in investigating human physiological alterations with age and disease. Similar findings…

Undulatory swimming is a widespread propulsion strategy adopted by many small-scale organisms including various single-cell eukaryotes and nematodes. In this work, we report a comprehensive study of undulatory locomotion of a finite…

Caenorhabditis elegans, a free-living soil nematode, propels itself by producing undulatory body motion and displays a rich variety of body shapes and trajectories during its locomotion in complex environments. Here we show that the complex…

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…

The roundworm C. elegans exhibits robust escape behavior in response to rapidly rising temperature. The behavior lasts for a few seconds, shows history dependence, involves both sensory and motor systems, and is too complicated to model…

How do the same mechanisms that faithfully regenerate complex developmental programs in spite of environmental and genetic perturbations also permit responsiveness to environmental signals, adaptation, and genetic evolution? Using the…

Efficient navigation in swarms often relies on the emergence of decentralized approaches that minimize traversal time or energy. Stigmergy, where agents modify a shared environment that then modifies their behavior, is a classic mechanism…

We analyse the neural dynamics and its relation with the emergent behaviour of a robotic vehicle that is controlled by a neural network numerical simulation based on the nervous system of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The robot…

Reorientation (turning in plane) plays a critical role for all robots in any field application, especially those that in confined spaces. While important, reorientation remains a relatively unstudied problem for robots, including limbless…

Animals must integrate sensory cues with their current behavioral context to generate a suitable response. How this integration occurs is poorly understood. Previously we developed high throughput methods to probe neural activity in…