Related papers: The Hidden Wheel-Within
We analyse the classical problem of the stability of bicycles when moving quickly and upright. Developing a lean causes the front wheel to turn thereby setting the bicycle instantaneously into circular motion. The centripetal force…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
This paper presents a soft earthworm robot that is capable of both efficient locomotion and obstacle avoidance. The robot is designed to replicate the unique locomotion mechanisms of earthworms, which enable them to move through narrow and…
In theoretical ecology, models describing the spatial dispersal and the temporal evolution of species having non-overlapping generations are often based on integrodifference equations. For various such applications the environment has an…
There is increasing evidence that mammalian cells not only crawl on substrates but can also swim in fluids. To elucidate the mechanisms of the onset of motility of cells in suspension, a model which couples actin and myosin kinetics to…
Animals exhibit an innate ability to learn regularities of the world through interaction. By performing experiments in their environment, they are able to discern the causal factors of variation and infer how they affect the world's…
"Self-organization" has become a watchword in developmental biology, characterizing observations in which embryonic or induced stem cells of animals replicate morphological steps and outcomes seen in intact embryos. While the term was…
From what is known today about the elementary particles of matter, and the forces that control their behavior, it may be observed that still a host of obstacles must be overcome that are standing in the way of further progress of our…
The automatic design of embodied agents (e.g. robots) has existed for 31 years and is experiencing a renaissance of interest in the literature. To date however, the field has remained narrowly focused on two kinds of anatomically simple…
Scaling laws illuminate Nature's fundamental biological principles and guide bioinspired materials and structural designs. In simple cases they are based on the fundamental principle that all laws of nature remain unchanged (i.e.,…
In recent years it has become evident the need of understanding how failure of coordination imposes constraints on the size of stable groups that highly social mammals can live in. We examine here the forces that keep animals together as a…
Soft robotics is an emerging field of research where the robot body is composed of compliant and soft materials. It allows the body to bend, twist, and deform to move or to adapt its shape to the environment for grasping, all of which are…
What are the functions of curiosity? What are the mechanisms of curiosity-driven learning? We approach these questions about the living using concepts and tools from machine learning and developmental robotics. We argue that…
Many physicists, following Einstein, believe that the ultimate aim of theoretical physics is to find a unified theory of all interactions which would not depend on any free dimensionless constant, i.e., a dimensionless constant that is only…
Living systems are thermodynamically open but closed in their organization. In other words, even though their material components turn over constantly, a material-independent property persists, which we call organization. Moreover,…
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
Particles in rotating saddle potentials exhibit precessional motion which, up to now, has been explained by explicit computation. We show that this precession is due to a hidden Coriolis-like force which, unlike the standard Coriolis force,…
Recurrent neural policies are widely used in partially observable control and meta-RL tasks. Their abilities to maintain internal memory and adapt quickly to unseen scenarios have offered them unparalleled performance when compared to…
Self-organized robots may develop attracting states within the sensorimotor loop, that is within the phase space of neural activity, body, and environmental variables. Fixpoints, limit cycles, and chaotic attractors correspond in this…
Fiberboids are active filaments trapped at the interface of two phases, able of harnessing energy (and matter) fluxes across the interface in order to produce a rolling-like self-propulsion. We discuss several table-top examples and develop…