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In chemotaxis, cells are modulating their migration patterns in response to concentration gradients of a guiding substance. Immune cells are believed to use such chemotactic sensing for remotely detecting and homing in on pathogens.…
Recent progress in diverse intelligence has shown simple learning capacities below the organism level - single cells and even molecular networks. However, there are still many knowledge gaps around learning capacity above the organism…
Cell movement in the early phase of C. elegans development is regulated by a highly complex process in which a set of rules and connections are formulated at distinct scales. Previous efforts have shown that agent-based, multi-scale…
Nature is in constant flux, so animals must account for changes in their environment when making decisions. How animals learn the timescale of such changes and adapt their decision strategies accordingly is not well understood. Recent…
Practical bipedal robot locomotion needs to be both energy efficient and robust to variability and uncertainty. In this paper, we build upon recent works in trajectory optimization for robot locomotion with two primary goals. First, we wish…
Despite the relative simplicity of C. elegans, its locomotion machinery is not yet well understood. We focus on the generation of dorsoventral body bends. While central pattern generators are commonly involved in animal locomotion, their…
Nature suggests that exploiting the elasticities and natural dynamics of robotic systems could increase their locomotion efficiency. Prior work on elastic snake robots supports this hypothesis, but has not fully exploited the nonlinear…
The model of interaction between learning and evolutionary optimization is designed and investigated. The evolving population of modeled organisms is considered. The mechanism of the genetic assimilation of the acquired features during a…
Different evolutionary models are known to make disparate predictions for the success of an invading mutant in some situations. For example, some evolutionary mechanics lead to amplification of selection in structured populations, while…
In this work, the control of snake robot locomotion via economic model predictive control (MPC) is studied. Only very few examples of applications of MPC to snake robots exist and rigorous proofs for recursive feasibility and convergence…
Self-avoidance is a common mechanism to improve the efficiency of a random walker for covering a spatial domain. However, how this efficiency decreases when self-avoidance is impaired or limited by other processes has remained largely…
Artificially evolving foraging behavior in simulated legged animals has proved to be a notoriously difficult task. Here, we co-evolve the morphology and controller for virtual organisms in a three-dimensional physically realistic…
We present a high-throughput optogenetic illumination system capable of simultaneous closed-loop light delivery to specified targets in populations of moving Caenorhabditis elegans. The instrument addresses three technical challenges: it…
Various microorganisms and some mammalian cells are able to swim in viscous fluids by performing nonreciprocal body deformations, such as rotating attached flagella or by distorting their entire body. In order to perform chemotaxis, i.e. to…
Living systems operate far from equilibrium, yet few general frameworks provide global bounds on biological transients. In high-dimensional biological networks like ecosystems, long transients arise from the separate timescales of…
We consider a random walk with transition probabilities weakly dependent on an environment with a deterministic, but strongly chaotic, evolution. We prove that for almost all initial conditions of the environment the walk satisfies the CLT.
We identify a fundamental phenomenon of heterogeneous one dimensional random walks: the escape (traversal) time is maximized when the heterogeneity in transition probabilities forms a pyramid-like potential barrier. This barrier corresponds…
We optimize three-dimensional snake kinematics for locomotor efficiency. We assume a general space-curve representation of the snake backbone with small-to-moderate lifting off the ground and negligible body inertia. The cost of locomotion…
The co-evolution between network structure and functional performance is a fundamental and challenging problem whose complexity emerges from the intrinsic interdependent nature of structure and function. Within this context, we investigate…
We study a simple model of a foraging animal that modifies the substrate on which it moves. This substrate provides its only resource, and the forager manage it by taking a limited portion at each visited site. The resource recovers its…