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Background: Caenorhabditis elegans is a major model system in biology, yet very little is known about its biology outside the laboratory. Especially, its unusual mode of reproduction with self-fertile hermaphrodites and facultative males…
A major problem in evolutionary biology is how species learn and adapt under the constraint of environmental conditions and competition of other species. Models of cyclic dominance provide simplified settings in which such questions can be…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
Contact-rich problems, such as snake robot locomotion, offer unexplored yet rich opportunities for optimization-based trajectory and acyclic contact planning. So far, a substantial body of control research has focused on emulating snake…
Understanding physical rules underlying collective motions requires perturbation of controllable parameters in self-propelled particles. However, controlling parameters in animals is generally not easy, which makes collective behaviours of…
Animals' internal states reflect variables like their position in space, orientation, decisions, and motor actions -- but how should these internal states be arranged? Internal states which frequently transition between one another should…
We study a continuum model of dislocation transport in order to investigate the formation of heterogeneous dislocation patterns. We propose a physical mechanism which relates the formation of heterogeneous patterns to the dynamics of a…
We study the asymptotic properties of nearest-neighbor random walks in 1d random environment under the influence of an external field of intensity $\lambda\in\mathbb{R}$. For ergodic shift-invariant environments, we show that the limiting…
The swimming behaviour of microorganisms can be strongly influenced by the rheology of their fluid environment. In this manuscript, we experimentally investigate the effects of shear-thinning viscosity on the swimming behaviour of an…
In this letter, we present a constraint-driven optimal control framework that achieves emergent cluster flocking within a constrained 2D environment. We formulate a decentralized optimal control problem that includes safety, flocking, and…
Motivated by a possible convergence of terrestrial limbless locomotion strategies ultimately determined by interfacial effects, we show how both 3D gait alterations and locomotory adaptations to heterogeneous terrains can be understood…
Transport phenomena in out-of-equilibrium systems is immensely important in a myriad of applications in biology, engineering and physics. Complex environments, such as the cytoplasm or porous media, can substantially affect the transport…
Many animals in their natural habitat exhibit collective motion and form complex patterns to tackle environmental difficulties. Several physical and biological factors, such as animal motility, population densities, and chemical cues, play…
Many microorganisms swim by performing larger non-reciprocal shape deformations that are initiated locally by molecular motors. However, it remains unclear how decentralized shape control determines the movement of the entire organism.…
Although commonly associated with limbless animals like snakes and fish, multi-legged organisms like centipedes also utilize undulatory locomotion. Whether these undulations are actively reinforced or resisted by the axial musculature…
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…
Self-propelling organisms locomote via generation of patterns of self-deformation. Despite the diversity of body plans, internal actuation schemes and environments in limbless vertebrates and invertebrates, such organisms often use similar…
Many organisms navigate gradients by alternating straight motions (runs) with random reorientations (tumbles), transiently suppressing tumbles whenever attractant signal increases. This induces a functional coupling between movement and…
Robot controllers are often optimised for a single robot in a single environment. This approach proves brittle, as such a controller will often fail to produce sensible behavior for a new morphology or environment. In comparison, animal…
This research introduces a novel heuristic algorithm known as the Snake Locomotion Learning Search algorithm (SLLS) designed to address optimization problems. The SLLS draws inspiration from the locomotion patterns observed in snakes,…