Related papers: Free Will and Falling Cats
A deformable body can rotate even with no angular momentum, simply by changing its shape. A good example is a falling cat, how it maneuvers in air to land on its feet. Here a first principles molecular level example of the phenomenon is…
Previous experiments [M. J. Coleman and A. Ruina, Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 3658 (1998)] showed that a gravity-powered toy with no control and which has no statically stable near-standing configurations can walk stably. We show here that a…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
Robot feet are crucial for maintaining dynamic stability and propelling the body during walking, especially on uneven terrains. Traditionally, robot feet were mostly designed as flat and stiff pieces of metal, which meets its limitations…
We built a simple two-leg toy that can walk stably with no control system. It walks downhill powered only by gravity. It seems to be the first McGeer-like passive-dynamic walker that is statically unstable in all standing positions, yet is…
Recent investigations on the longitudinal and lateral control of wheeled autonomous vehicles are reported. Flatness-based techniques are first introduced via a simplified model. It depends on some physical parameters, like cornering…
One usually thinks of a cat moving from one room to another in an apartment as random walk model. Imagine now that it also has the possibility to go from one apartment to another by crossing some corridors. That yields a new probabilistic…
Animals have remarkable abilities to adapt locomotion to different terrains and tasks. However, robots trained by means of reinforcement learning are typically able to solve only a single task and a transferred policy is usually inferior to…
Flapping wing flight is a challenging dynamical problem and is also a very fascinating subject to study in the field of biomimetic robotics. A Bat, in particular, has a very articulated armwing mechanism with high degrees-of-freedom and…
Getting up from an arbitrary fallen state is a basic human skill. Existing methods for learning this skill often generate highly dynamic and erratic get-up motions, which do not resemble human get-up strategies, or are based on tracking…
Quadruped robots are machines intended for challenging and harsh environments. Despite the progress in locomotion strategy, safely recovering from unexpected falls or planned drops is still an open problem. It is further made more difficult…
Artificial ants are "small" units, moving autonomously on a shared, dynamically changing "space", directly or indirectly exchanging some kind of information. Artificial ants are frequently conceived as a paradigm for collective adaptive…
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 objects and their configurations. Developmental…
A robot's mechanical parts routinely wear out from normal functioning and can be lost to injury. For autonomous robots operating in isolated or hostile environments, repair from a human operator is often not possible. Thus, much work has…
Inverted landing is a challenging feat to perform in aerial robots, especially without external positioning. However, it is routinely performed by biological fliers such as bees, flies, and bats. Our previous observations of landing…
The abstract concept of indeterministic free will is distinguished from the phenomenon of free will. Evidence for the abstract concept is examined and critically compared with various designs of automata. It is concluded that there is no…
This paper addresses the following main question: Do we have a theoretical understanding of entanglement applicable to a full variety of physical settings? It is clear that not only the assumption of distinguishability, but also the…
Cat states are coherent quantum superpositions of macroscopically distinct states and are useful for understanding the boundary between the classical and the quantum world. Due to their macroscopic nature, cat states are difficult to…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
A common-sense perception of a physical system is that it is inseparable from its physical properties. The notion of Quantum Cheshire Cat challenges this, as far as quantum systems are concerned. It shows that a quantum system can be…