Related papers: Minimal design of the elephant trunk as an active …
A notable feature of the elephant trunk is the pronounced wrinkling that enables its great flexibility. Here, we devise a general mathematical model that accounts for the characteristic skin wrinkles formed during morphogenesis in the…
Nature uses elongated shapes and filaments to build stable structures, generate motion, and allow complex geometric interactions. In this Review, we examine the role of biological filaments across different length scales. From the molecular…
The logarithmic spiral is observed as a common pattern in several living beings across kingdoms and species. Some examples include fern shoots, prehensile tails, and soft limbs like octopus arms and elephant trunks. In the latter cases,…
Keratin composites enable animals to hike with hooves, fly with feathers, and sense with skin. These distinct functions arise from variations in the underlying properties and microscale arrangement of this natural polymer. One well-studied…
Grasping, in both biological and engineered mechanisms, can be highly sensitive to the gripper and object morphology, as well as perception, and motion planning. Here we circumvent the need for feedback or precise planning by using an array…
Soft robots, inspired by elephant trunks or octopus arms, offer extraordinary flexibility to bend, twist, and elongate in ways that rigid robots cannot. However, their motion planning remains a challenge, especially in cluttered…
Inspired by the dexterous handling ability of an elephant's trunk, we propose a pneumatic actuator that generates diverse bending and extension motions in a flexible arm. The actuator consists of two flexible tubes. Each flexible tube is…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
One of the greatest challenges of terrestrial locomotion is resisting gravity. The morphological adaptive features of the limb long-bones of extant elephants, the heaviest living terrestrial animals, have previously been highlighted;…
The elephant trunk exemplifies a natural gripper where structure, actuation, and sensing are seamlessly integrated. Inspired by the distal morphology of the African elephant trunk, we present MELEGROS, a Monolithic ELEphant-inspired GRipper…
In active matter systems, deformable boundaries provide a mechanism to organize internal active stresses and perform work on the external environment. To study a minimal model of such a system, we perform particle-based simulations of an…
Networks of flexible filaments often involve regions of tight contact. Predictively understanding the equilibrium configurations of these systems is challenging due to intricate couplings between topology, geometry, large nonlinear…
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…
Bipedal animals have diverse morphologies and advanced locomotion abilities. Terrestrial birds, in particular, display agile, efficient, and robust running motion, in which they exploit the interplay between the body segment masses and…
Objective: Brain is a fantastic organ that helps creature adapting to the environment. Network is the most essential structure of brain, but the capability of a simple network is still not very clear. In this study, we try to expound some…
Living matter moves, deforms, and organizes itself. In cells this is made possible by networks of polymer filaments and crosslinking molecules that connect filaments to each other and that act as motors to do mechanical work on the network.…
The brain is an intricately structured organ responsible for the rich emergent dynamics that support the complex cognitive functions we enjoy as humans. With around $10^{11}$ neurons and $10^{15}$ synapses, understanding how the human brain…
The brain is immensely complex, with diverse components and dynamic interactions building upon one another to orchestrate a wide range of functions and behaviors. Understanding patterns of these complex interactions and how they are…
The brain is a complex organ characterized by heterogeneous patterns of structural connections supporting unparalleled feats of cognition and a wide range of behaviors. New noninvasive imaging techniques now allow these patterns to be…