Related papers: A variational approach to geometric mechanics for …
Self-propelling organisms locomote via generation of patterns of self-deformation. Despite the diversity of body plans, internal actuation schemes and environments in limbless vertebrates and invertebrates, such organisms often use similar…
Geometric mechanics models of locomotion have provided insight into how robots and animals use environmental interactions to convert internal shape changes into displacement through the world, encoding this relationship in a ``motility…
Serially connected robots are promising candidates for performing tasks in confined spaces such as search-and-rescue in large-scale disasters. Such robots are typically limbless, and we hypothesize that the addition of limbs could improve…
Limbless robots have the potential to maneuver through cluttered environments that conventional robots cannot traverse. As illustrated in their biological counterparts such as snakes and nematodes, limbless locomotors can benefit from…
Data-driven models of robot motion constructed using principles from Geometric Mechanics have been shown to produce useful predictions of robot motion for a variety of robots. For robots with a useful number of DoF, these geometric…
Locomotion is typically studied either in continuous media where bodies and legs experience forces generated by the flowing medium, or on solid substrates dominated by friction. In the former, centralized coordination is believed to…
In this work, we utilize discrete geometric mechanics to derive a 2nd-order variational integrator so as to simulate rigid body dynamics. The developed integrator is to simulate the motion of a free rigid body and a quad-rotor. We…
The aim of this work is to study the geometry underlying mechanics and its application to describe autonomous and nonautonomous conservative dynamical systems of different types; as well as dissipative dynamical systems. We use different…
Latent variable models are powerful tools for learning low-dimensional manifolds from high-dimensional data. However, when dealing with constrained data such as unit-norm vectors or symmetric positive-definite matrices, existing approaches…
Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…
Robots often interact with the world via attached parts such as wheels, joints, or appendages. In many systems, these interactions, and the manner in which they lead to locomotion, can be understood using the machinery of geometric…
Combining geometric mechanics theory, laboratory robotic experiment and numerical simulation, we study the locomotion in granular media (GM) of the simplest non-inertial swimmer, the Purcell three-link swimmer. Using granular resistive…
Although typically possessing four limbs and short bodies, lizards have evolved a diversity of body plans, from short-bodied and fully-limbed to elongate and nearly limbless. Such diversity in body morphology is hypothesized as adaptations…
Despite the progress in legged robotic locomotion, autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains an open problem. Ideally, the navigation system utilizes the full potential of the robots' locomotion capabilities while operating…
For robots to work alongside humans and perform in unstructured environments, they must learn new motion skills and adapt them to unseen situations on the fly. This demands learning models that capture relevant motion patterns, while…
Locomotion requires that an animal or robot be able to move itself forward farther than it moves backward in each gait cycle (formally, that it be able to break the symmetry of its interactions with the world). Previous work has established…
We develop the equations of motion for full body models that describe the dynamics of rigid bodies, acting under their mutual gravity. The equations are derived using a variational approach where variations are defined on the Lie group of…
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…
Adaptive structures are characterized by their ability to adjust their geometrical and other properties to changing loads or requirements during service. This contribution deals with a method for the design of quasi-static motions of…
Undulatory locomotion is a means of self-propulsion that relies on the generation and propagation of waves along a body. As a mode of locomotion it is primitive and relatively simple, yet can be remarkably robust. No wonder then, that it is…