Related papers: Free Will and Falling Cats
The quantum version of the free fall problem is a topic often skipped in undergraduate quantum mechanics courses because its discussion usually requires wavepackets built on the Airy functions -- a difficult computation. Here, on the…
Newborn animals have advanced perceptual skills at birth, but the nature of this initial knowledge is unknown. Is initial knowledge flexible, continuously adapting to the statistics of experience? Or can initial knowledge be rigid and…
Locomotion emerges from effective interactions of an individual with its environment. Principles of biological terrestrial locomotion have been discovered on unconfined vertical and horizontal substrates. However a diversity of organisms…
Physical reasoning is a core aspect of intelligence in animals and humans. A central question is what model should be used as a basis for reasoning. Existing work considered models ranging from intuitive physics and physical simulators to…
Locomotion by shape changes (spermatozoon swimming, snake slithering, bird flapping) or gas expulsion (rocket firing) is assumed to require environmental interaction, due to conservation of momentum. As first noted in (Wisdom, 2003) and…
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…
Balancing oneself using the spine is a physiological alignment of the body posture in the most efficient manner by the muscular forces for mammals. For this reason, we can see many disabled quadruped animals can still stand or walk even…
In this article, we show that learned policies can be applied to solve legged locomotion control tasks with extensive flight phases, such as those encountered in space exploration. Using an off-the-shelf deep reinforcement learning…
Quadruped animals seamlessly transition between gaits as they change locomotion speeds. While the most widely accepted explanation for gait transitions is energy efficiency, there is no clear consensus on the determining factor, nor on the…
The Rattleback is a very popular science toy shown to students all over the world to demonstrate the non-triviality of rotational motion. When spun on a horizontal table, this boat-shaped object behaves in a peculiar way. Although the…
Can certain degrees of freedom of a closed physical system, described by a time-independent Hamiltonian, become more and more classical as they evolve from some state? This question is important because our universe seems to have done just…
The rattleback or celt top is a rigid body with the peculiar behaviour of having a spontaneous spin reversion during its motion and this effect is usually attributed purely to its nonholonomic nature. Actually, the rattleback is the…
In this paper we are interested to the zygodactyly phenomenon in birds, and in particolar in parrots. This arrangement, common in species living on trees, is a distribution of the foot with two toes facing forward and two back. We give a…
We show that if one starts with a Universe with some matter and a cosmological constant, then quantum mechanics naturally induces an attractive gravitational potential and an effective Newton's coupling. Thus gravity is an emergent…
Flight is a complicated task at small scales in part due to the ubiquitous unsteady air which contains it. Flying organisms deal with these difficulties using active and passive control mechanisms to steer their body motion. Body attitudes…
Fitts' law is a fundamental tool in measuring the capacity of the human motor system. However, it is, by definition, limited to aimed movements toward spatially expanded targets. We revisit its information-theoretic basis with the goal of…
Humanoid robots have received significant research interests and advancements in recent years. Despite many successes, due to their morphology, dynamics and limitation of control policy, humanoid robots are prone to fall as compared to…
The emergence of vision catalysed a pivotal evolutionary advancement, enabling organisms not only to perceive but also to interact intelligently with their environment. This transformation is mirrored by the evolution of robotic systems,…
With the introduction of the laterally bounded forces, the tilt-rotor gains more flexibility in the controller design. Typical feedback linearization methods utilize all the inputs in controlling this vehicle; the magnitudes as well as the…
The physical concept of quantum entanglement is brought to the biological domain. We simulate the cooperation of two insects by hypothesizing that they share a large number of quantum entangled spin-1/2 particles. Each of them makes…