Related papers: Free Will and Falling Cats
This paper provides an enjoyable example through which several concepts of classical mechanics can be understood. We introduce an equation that models the motion of a cat in the presence of a person. The cat is considered as a point…
Since their domestication at the dawn of civilization, cats have been known for their uncanny ability to seemingly defy gravity. We conjecture that this innate ability of cats is real: uniquely in the animal kingdom, felis catus, possibly…
Seemingly in defiance of basic physics, cats consistently land on their feet after falling. In this paper, we design a controller that lands the Mini Cheetah quadruped robot on its feet as well. Specifically, we explore how trajectory…
We present a simple, two dimensional example of a "cat" -- a body with zero angular momentum that can rotate itself with no external forces. This model is used to explain why this problem is known to be a gauge theory and to illustrate the…
The flight characteristics of bats remarkably have been overlooked in aerial drone designs. Unlike other animals, bats leverage the manipulation of inertial dynamics to exhibit aerial flip turns when they perch. Inspired by this unique…
Flying animals, such as bats, fly through their fluidic environment as they create air jets and form wake structures downstream of their flight path. Bats, in particular, dynamically morph their highly flexible and dexterous armwing to…
Arguments have been raised that the system--observer cut of quantum mechanics can be shifted arbitrarily close to, or even into, the conscious observer. Here I show that this view leads to {\it observable} contradictions (despite our…
A freely falling chain from a cup at certain height can jump. The process can be divided into two parts: a stable suspension and an accelerating procedure. Variational principle and force analysis demonstrate that the shape of stable…
Bats' dynamic morphing wings are known to be extremely high-dimensional, and they employ the combination of inertial dynamics and aerodynamics manipulations to showcase extremely agile maneuvers. Bats heavily rely on their highly flexible…
We compare two different ways of quantization a simple sequential game Cat's Dilemma in the context of the debate on intransitive and transitive preferences. This kind of analysis can have essential meaning for the research on the…
The slinky, released from rest hanging under its own weight, falls in a peculiar manner. The bottom stays at rest until a wave hits it from above. Two cases -- one unphysical one where the slinky is able to pass through itself, and the…
The nRules that are developed in another paper are applied to two versions of the Schrodinger cat experiment. In version I the initially conscious cat is made unconscious by a mechanism that is initiated by a radioactive decay. In version…
Falling cat problem is well-known where cats show their super aerial reorientation capability and can land safely. For their robotic counterparts, a similar falling quadruped robot problem, has not been fully addressed, although achieving…
Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel object and their configurations. Developmental psychology…
Fluid dynamics, and flight in particular, is a domain where organisms challenge our understanding of its physics. Integrating the current knowledge of animal flight, we propose to revisit the use of live animals to study physical phenomena.…
Animal movement exhibits complex behavior which can be influenced by unobserved environmental conditions. We propose a model which allows for a spatially-varying movement rate and spatially-varying drift through a semiparametric potential…
Despite recent advances in robust locomotion, bipedal robots operating in the real world remain at risk of falling. While most research focuses on preventing such events, we instead concentrate on the phenomenon of falling itself.…
There is this old, eternal question: Why don't animals have wheels? In this perspective we show that they actually do. And they do so in a physically extraordinary way -- by combining incompatible elasticity, differential geometry and…
There have been extensive studies of a random walk among a field of immobile traps (or obstacles), where one is interested in the probability of survival as well as the law of the random walk conditioned on its survival up to time $t$. In…
In this paper we study the locomotion of a shape-changing body swimming in a two-dimensional perfect fluid of infinite extent. The shape-changes are prescribed as functions of time satisfying constraints ensuring that they result from the…