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During muscle contraction, myosin motors anchored to thick filaments bind to and slide actin thin filaments. These motors rely on energy derived from ATP, supplied, in part, by diffusion from the sarcoplasm to the interior of the lattice of…
The discontinuous jump in the bulk modulus $B$ at the jamming transition is a consequence of the formation of a critical contact network of spheres that resists compression. We introduce lattice models with underlying under-coordinated…
Embodiment is a significant keyword in recent machine learning fields. This study focused on the passive nature of the body of a biped robot to generate walking and running locomotion using model-based deep reinforcement learning. We…
Legged locomotion is commonly studied and expressed as a discrete set of gait patterns, like walk, trot, gallop, which are usually treated as given and pre-programmed in legged robots for efficient locomotion at different speeds. However,…
Granular jamming is a popular soft robotics technology that has seen recent widespread applications including industrial gripping, surgical robotics and haptics. However, to date the field has not fully exploited the fundamental science of…
Many kinds of adult Lepidoptera insects possess a long proboscis which is used to suck liquids and has the coiling and uncoiling movements. Although experiments revealed qualitatively that the coiling movement is governed by the hydraulic…
Quadrupedal animals employ diverse galloping strategies to optimize speed, stability, and energy efficiency. However, the biomechanical mechanisms that enable adaptive gait transitions during high-speed locomotion under load remain poorly…
Animals moving together in groups are believed to interact among each other with effective social forces, such as attraction, repulsion and alignment. Such forces can be inferred using 'force maps', i.e. by analysing the dependency of the…
In collective motion, perceptually-limited individuals move in an ordered manner, without centralized control. The perception of each individual is highly localized, as is its ability to interact with others. While natural collective motion…
The large active wing deformation is a significant way to generate high aerodynamic forces required in bat flapping flight. Besides the twisting, the elementary morphing models of a bat wing are proposed, such as wing-bending in the…
Robust and energy-efficient bipedal locomotion in robotics is still a challenging topic. In order to address issues in this field, we can take inspiration from nature, by studying human locomotion. The Spring-Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP)…
Recent trials of a neuronal pacemaker have shown that cardiac pumping efficiency increases when respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is artificially restored in animal models of heart failure. This novel device sheds new light on the…
Activation sparsity refers to the existence of considerable weakly-contributed elements among activation outputs. As a prevalent property of the models using the ReLU activation function, activation sparsity has been proven a promising…
Swelling-induced snap-buckling in a 3D micro hydrogel device, inspired by the insect-trapping action of Venus flytrap, makes it possible to generate astonishingly fast actuation. We demonstrate that elastic energy is effectively stored and…
It is widely recognized that biological collectives operate near criticality to amplify their capability of collective response. The peak in susceptibility near criticality renders these groups highly responsive to external stimuli. While…
Spring-based actuators in legged locomotion provide energy-efficiency and improved performance, but increase the difficulty of controller design. While previous work has focused on extensive modeling and simulation to find optimal…
Walking animals, like stick insects, cockroaches or ants, demonstrate a fascinating range of locomotive abilities and complex behaviors. The locomotive behaviors can consist of a variety of walking patterns along with adaptation that allow…
Tiny flying insects of body lengths under 2 mm use the `clap-and-fling' mechanism with bristled wings for lift augmentation and drag reduction at chord-based Reynolds number ($Re$) on $\mathcal{O}$(10). We examine wing-wing interaction of…
Jumping is an efficient locomotion strategy to traverse cluttered, uneven, or unstable environments in nature, yet replicating continuous, autonomous leaping in soft robots remains challenging due to limited energy storage and reliance on…
The elastic response of dense suspensions under an impact is studied using coupled Lattice Boltzmann Method and Discrete Element Method (LBM-DEM) and its reduced model. We succeed to extract the elastic force acting on the impactor in dense…