Related papers: Free Will and Falling Cats
We discuss some properties of a class of cellular automata sometimes called a "generalized ant". This system is perhaps most easily understood by thinking of an ant which moves about a lattice in the plane. At each vertex (or "cell"), the…
Saving energy and enhancing performance are secular preoccupations shared by both nature and human beings. In animal locomotion, flapping flyers or swimmers rely on the flexibility of their wings or body to passively increase their…
We propose a new model in order to study behaviors of self-organized system such as a group of animals. We assume that the individuals have two degrees of freedom corresponding one to their internal state and the other to their external…
Humans have a remarkable ability to predict the effect of physical interactions on the dynamics of objects. Endowing machines with this ability would allow important applications in areas like robotics and autonomous vehicles. In this work,…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…
The work lays the foundations of the theory of changeable sets. In author opinion, this theory, in the process of it's development and improvement, can become one of the tools of solving the sixth Hilbert problem least for physics of…
We present a robot base placement and control method that enables a mobile manipulator to gracefully recover from manipulation failures while performing tasks on-the-move. A mobile manipulator in motion has a limited window to complete a…
Recent advances in machine learning have dramatically improved our ability to model language, vision, and other high-dimensional data, yet they continue to struggle with one of the most fundamental aspects of biological systems: movement.…
Studying animal movements is essential for effective wildlife conservation and conflict mitigation. For aerial movements, operational weather radars have become an indispensable data source in this respect. However, partial measurements,…
We consider the motion of a rigid body due to the pressure of a surrounded two-dimensional irrotational perfect incompressible fluid, the whole system being confined in a bounded domain with an impermeable condition on a part of the…
Animals such as rabbits and birds can instantly generate locomotion behavior in reaction to a dynamic, approaching object, such as a person or a rock, despite having possibly never seen the object before and having limited perception of the…
Falling is an inherent risk of humanoid mobility. Maintaining stability is thus a primary safety focus in robot control and learning, yet no existing approach fully averts loss of balance. When instability does occur, prior work addresses…
Colonies of ants are systems of interacting living organisms in which interactions between individuals and their environment can produce a reliable performance of a complex tasks without the need for centralised control. Particularly…
Self-attractive random walks undergo a phase transition in terms of the applied drift: If the drift is strong enough, then the walk is ballistic, whereas in the case of small drifts self-attraction wins and the walk is sub-ballistic. We…
The basic idea here is that observation (or one's experience) is fundamental and the `atomic world' is postulated as the source of such observation. Once this source has been inferred to exist one may attempt to explicitly derive its…
Free will is an old philosophical enigma that has been recently revived by neuropsychology. We restrict ourselves to the problem that determinism seems to allow only an illusion of freedom but random decissions do not contain any freedom…
Can a quadrupedal robot perform bipedal motions like humans? Although developing human-like behaviors is more often studied on costly bipedal robot platforms, we present a solution over a lightweight quadrupedal robot that unlocks the…
Superposed coherent states are central to quantum technologies, yet their reliable identification remains a challenge, especially in noisy or resource-constrained settings. We introduce a novel, directly measurable criterion for detecting…
In this paper, we study the "free exploration" of individual ants of the species Atta insularis, i.e., their motion on a featureless flat, horizontal surface. Two basic preliminary results emerge from our work (a) the free exploration is…
Stability of running on rough terrain depends on the propagation of perturbations due to the ground. We consider stability within the sagittal plane and model the dynamics of running as a two-dimensional body with an alternating aerial and…