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Compared to human vision, locust visual systems excel at rapid and precise collision detection, despite relying on only hundreds of thousands of neurons organized through a few neuropils. This efficiency makes them an attractive model…
Our understanding of the neural basis of locomotor behavior can be informed by careful quantification of animal movement. Classical descriptions of legged locomotion have defined discrete locomotor gaits, characterized by distinct patterns…
Inspired by the unique neurophysiology of the octopus, we propose a hierarchical framework that simplifies the coordination of multiple soft arms by decomposing control into high-level decision making, low-level motor activation, and local…
Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…
Biomimicry has played a pivotal role in robotics. In contrast to rigid robots, bio-inspired robots exhibit an inherent compliance, facilitating versatile movements and operations in constrained spaces. The robot implementation in…
The octopus arm is a neuromechanical system that involves a complex interplay between peripheral nervous system (PNS) and arm musculature. This makes the arm capable of carrying out rich maneuvers. In this paper, we build a model for the…
Spatial systems with heterogeneities are ubiquitous in nature, from precipitation, temperature and soil gradients controlling vegetation growth to morphogen gradients controlling gene expression in embryos. Such systems, generally described…
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) is used as a model organism to better understand developmental biology and neurobiology. C. elegans features an invariant cell lineage, which has been catalogued and observed using…
Small-scale structures on biological surfaces can profoundly impact how animals move, appear, and interact with their environments. Such textures may be especially important for limbless reptiles, such as snakes and legless lizards, because…
Although commonly associated with limbless animals like snakes and fish, multi-legged organisms like centipedes also utilize undulatory locomotion. Whether these undulations are actively reinforced or resisted by the axial musculature…
C. elegans locomotion is composed of switches between forward and reversal states punctuated by turns. This locomotory capability is necessary for the nematode to move towards attractive stimuli, escape noxious chemicals, and explore its…
Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…
Understanding the dynamical behavior of complex systems from their underlying network architectures is a long-standing question in complexity theory. Therefore, many metrics have been devised to extract network features like motifs,…
This research report introduces ElegansNet, a neural network that mimics real-world neuronal network circuitry, with the goal of better understanding the interplay between connectome topology and deep learning systems. The proposed approach…
Multi-legged mobile robots possess high mobility performance in rough terrain environments, stemming from their high postural stability, joint flexibility, and the redundancy provided by multiple legs. In prior research on navigating…
Here we introduce simple structures for the analysis of complex hypergraphs, hypergraph animals. These structures are designed to describe the local node neighbourhoods of nodes in hypergraphs. We establish their relationships to lattice…
Novel compute systems are an emerging research topic, aiming towards building next-generation compute platforms. For these systems to thrive, they need to be provided as research infrastructure to allow acceptance and usage by a large…
In vitro neuronal culture is an important research platform in cellular and network neuroscience. However, neurons cultured on a homogeneous scaffold form dense, randomly connected networks and display excessively synchronized activity;…
Interactions with large language models have led to the suggestion that these models may soon be conscious. From the perspective of neuroscience, this position is difficult to defend. For one, the inputs to large language models lack the…
Various microorganisms and some mammalian cells are able to swim in viscous fluids by performing nonreciprocal body deformations, such as rotating attached flagella or by distorting their entire body. In order to perform chemotaxis, i.e. to…