Related papers: Free Will and Falling Cats
The impression of free will is the feeling according to which our choices are neither imposed from our inside nor from outside. It is the sense we are the ultimate cause of our acts. In direct opposition with the universal determinism, the…
Quadrupedal animals can perform agile and playful tasks while interacting with real-world objects. For instance, a trained dog can track and catch a flying frisbee before it touches the ground, while a cat left alone at home may leap to…
Non-autonomous dynamical systems help us to understand the implications of real systems which are in contact with their environment as it actually occurs in nature. Here, we focus on systems where a parameter changes with time at small but…
Most of us must have been fascinated by the eye catching displays of collectively moving animals. Schools of fish can move in a rather orderly fashion and then change direction amazingly abruptly. There are a huge number of further examples…
Soft robotics has opened a unique path to flexibility and environmental adaptability, learning from nature and reproducing biological behaviors. Nature implies answers for how to apply robots to real life. To find out how we learn from…
Biologically-inspired robots are a very interesting and difficult branch of robotics dues to its very rich dynamical and morphological complexities. Among them, flying animals, such as bats, have been among the most difficult to take…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
The possibility of quantum interference of a composite object with many internal degrees of freedom is studied, such that the internal degrees play a role of an internal environment. In particular, if the internal degrees have a capacity…
A flying trapeze act can be a challenging task for a robotics system since some act requires the performer to catch another trapeze or catcher at the end after being airborne. The objective of this paper is to design and validate a motion…
A real-time motion training system for skydiving is proposed. Aerial maneuvers are performed by changing the body posture and thus deflecting the surrounding airflow. The natural learning process is extremely slow due to unfamiliar…
We are interested in learning models of intuitive physics similar to the ones that animals use for navigation, manipulation and planning. In addition to learning general physical principles, however, we are also interested in learning ``on…
Self-Modeling is the process by which an agent, such as an animal or machine, learns to create a predictive model of its own dynamics. Once captured, this self-model can then allow the agent to plan and evaluate various potential behaviors…
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. In this work, we…
Cat states are systems in a superposition of macroscopically distinguishable states; this superposition can be of either classically or quantum distinct state, regardless of the number of particles or modes involved. Here, we constructed an…
A modified version of Langton's ant is considered. The modified automaton is allowed to go straight $N$-th step instead of turning. The cell state, however, is changed as usually. Depending on the value of $N$ the automaton exhibits…
In the present paper we revisit, theoretical and experimentally, the fall of a folded U-chain and of a pile-chain. The model calculation implies the division of the whole system into two subsystems of variable mass, allowing to explore the…
A closer look (with hindsight) at Newtonian and relativistic kinematics reveals two things. Not surprisingly, Newtonian time remains the empty and artificial - albeit useful - figment it is known to be. Quite unexpectedly however it turns…
The notions of taxis and kinesis are introduced and used to describe two types of behavior of an organism in non-uniform conditions: (i) Taxis means the guided movement to more favorable conditions; (ii) Kinesis is the non-directional…
This paper presents a framework to define a task with freedom and variability in its goal state. A robot could use this to observe the execution of a task and target a different goal from the observed one; a goal that is still compatible…
Conditions are investigated under which a body lying at rest or rocking on a solid horizontal surface can be removed from the surface by hydrodynamic forces or instead continues rocking. The investigation is motivated by recent observations…