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Legged robots offer several advantages when navigating unstructured environments, but they often fall short of the efficiency achieved by wheeled robots. One promising strategy to improve their energy economy is to leverage their natural…
We study a minimal model of a crawling eukaryotic cell with a chemical polarity controlled by a reaction-diffusion mechanism describing Rho GTPase dynamics. The size, shape, and speed of the cell emerge from the combination of the chemical…
Minimising the energy consumption associated with periodic motion is a priority common to a wide range of technologies and organisms - among them, many species of flying insect, for which flapping-wing flight is a life-essential mode of…
Many living and physical systems such as cell aggregates, tissues or bacterial colonies behave as unconventional systems of particles that are strongly constrained by volume exclusion and shape interactions. Understanding how these…
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…
This paper addresses the challenges of distributed formation control in multiple mobile robots, introducing a novel approach that enhances real-world practicability. We first introduce a distributed estimator using a variable structure and…
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…
To maintain full autonomy, autonomous robotic systems must have the ability to self-repair. Self-repairing via compensatory mechanisms appears in nature: for example, some fish can lose even 76% of their propulsive surface without loss of…
In robotics, structural design and behavior optimization have long been considered separate processes, resulting in the development of systems with limited capabilities. Recently, co-design methods have gained popularity, where bi-level…
Many motile biological cells navigate along concentration gradients of signaling molecules: This chemotaxis guides for instance sperm cells from marine invertebrates, which have to find egg cells in the ocean. While chemotaxis has been…
In a variety of biological processes, eukaryotic cells use cilia to transport flow. Although cilia have a remarkably conserved internal molecular structure, experimental observations report very diverse kinematics. To address this…
This article explores human-like movement from a fresh perspective on motion planning. We analyze the coordinated and compliant movement mechanisms of the human body from the perspective of biomechanics. Based on these mechanisms, we…
Recent advancements in robotics have transformed industries such as manufacturing, logistics, surgery, and planetary exploration. A key challenge is developing efficient motion planning algorithms that allow robots to navigate complex…
Elongate animals and robots use undulatory body waves to locomote through diverse environments. Geometric mechanics provides a framework to model and optimize such systems in highly damped environments, connecting a prescribed shape change…
We develop a dynamical systems approach to prioritizing and selecting multiple recurring tasks with the aim of conferring a degree of deliberative goal selection to a mobile robot confronted with competing objectives. We take navigation as…
Amphibious robots, operating seamlessly across land and water, are advancing applications in conservation, disaster response, and defense. Their performance depends on locomotion mechanisms, actuation technologies, and sensor-control…
As society paves its way towards device miniaturization and precision medicine, micro-scale actuation and guided transport become increasingly prominent research fields with high impact in both technological and clinical contexts. In order…
Robotic materials are multi-robot systems formulated to leverage the low-order computation and actuation of the constituents to manipulate the high-order behavior of the entire material. We study the behaviors of ensembles composed of smart…
In evolutionary robotics, jointly optimising the design and the controller of robots is a challenging task due to the huge complexity of the solution space formed by the possible combinations of body and controller. We focus on the…
Drawing inspiration from flight behavior in biological settings (e.g. territorial battles in dragonflies, and flocking in starlings), this paper demonstrates two strategies for coverage and flocking. Using earlier theoretical studies on…