Related papers: Free Will and Falling Cats
The motion of social insects is often used a paradigmatic example of complex adaptive dynamics arising from decentralized individual behavior. In this paper we revisit the topic of the ruling laws behind burst of activity in ants. The…
Machines that can predict the effect of physical interactions on the dynamics of previously unseen object instances are important for creating better robots and interactive virtual worlds. In this work, we focus on predicting the dynamics…
A loop of chain can move along its own tangents, maintaining a steady shape. An open-ended chain undergoing a nontrivial motion must change its shape. One consequence is that chains pulled around objects will fail to follow the contours of…
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…
Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…
Animals and robots must self-right on the ground after overturning. Biology research described various strategies and motor patterns in many species. Robotics research devised many strategies. However, we do not well understand how the…
Automatic fall recovery is a crucial prerequisite before humanoid robots can be reliably deployed. Hand-designing controllers for getting up is difficult because of the varied configurations a humanoid can end up in after a fall and the…
This article may be seen as a summary and a final discussion of the work that the author has done in recent years on the foundation of quantum theory. It is shown that quantum mechanics as a model follows under certain specific conditions…
Although the title seems self-contradictory, it does not contain a misprint. The model we study is a seemingly minor modification of the "true self-avoiding walk" (TSAW) model of Amit, Parisi, and Peliti in two dimensions. The walks in it…
From the mesoscopic point of view, a new concept of soft matching for mass points is proposed. Then a soft Lasso's approach to learn the soft dynamical equation for the physical mechanical relationship is proposed, too. Furthermore, a…
We study a simple example of a sequential game illustrating problems connected with making rational decisions that are universal for social sciences. The set of chooser's optimal decisions that manifest his preferences in case of a constant…
The motion of water filled bottles is studied when it is thrown into the air and falls back to the floor, including the possibilities of an upright landing or rolling down before it finally reaches static state. When dealing with the…
Several scenarios used in teaching feature a rolling motion with slipping that transitions to one without through friction with the ground. We summarise these transitions by introducing an unknown impulse that is transferred to the ground.…
Newton's First Law of Motion is typically understood to govern only the motion of force-free bodies. This paper argues on textual and conceptual grounds that it is in fact a stronger, more general principle. The First Law limits the extent…
We consider the problem of quantum behavior in the finite background. Introduction of continuum or other infinities into physics leads only to technical complications without any need for them in description of empirical observations. The…
With the rising applications of robots in unstructured real-world environments, roboticists are increasingly concerned with the problems posed by the complexity of such environments. One solution to these problems is robot autonomy. Since…
The paper is focused on the discussion of the phenomenon of transitional chaos in dynamic autonomous and non-autonomous systems. This phenomenon involves the disappearance of chaotic oscillations in specific time periods and the system…
Successful aerial manipulation largely depends on how effectively a controller can tackle the coupling dynamic forces between the aerial vehicle and the manipulator. However, this control problem has remained largely unsolved as the…
Many have proposed that free will would use quantum indeterminism. Strict adherence to the Born rule, which follows from the no-signal condition, seems to block this possibility. I propose here that if state collapse really does occur then…
This study offers an interdisciplinary approach to movement technique analysis, designed to deal with intensive interaction between an environment and a trainee. The free-fall stage of skydiving is investigated, when aerial maneuvers are…