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Robots are becoming increasingly essential for traversing complex environments such as disaster areas, extraterrestrial terrains, and marine environments. Yet, their potential is often limited by mobility and adaptability constraints. In…
We optimize three-dimensional snake kinematics for locomotor efficiency. We assume a general space-curve representation of the snake backbone with small-to-moderate lifting off the ground and negligible body inertia. The cost of locomotion…
Anatomical connectivity between different regions in the brain can be mapped to a network representation, the connectome, where the intensities of the links, the weights, influence its structural resilience and the functional processes it…
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…
Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) exhibit powerful capabilities for generating natural text. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) can discover diverse solutions to complex real-world problems. Motivated by the common collective and…
Both animal and plant tissue exhibit a nonlinear rheological phenomenon known as compression stiffening, or an increase in moduli with increasing uniaxial compressive strain. Does such a phenomenon exist in single cells, which are the…
It is still not understood how similar genomic sequences have generated diverse and spectacular forms during evolution. The difficulty to bridge phenotypes and genotypes stems from the complexity of multicellular systems, where thousands of…
Centipede-like robots offer unique locomotion advantages due to their small cross-sectional area for accessing confined spaces, and their redundant legs enhance robustness in cluttered environments such as search-and-rescue and pipe…
Filamentous bio-materials such as fibrin or collagen networks exhibit an enormous stiffening of their elastic moduli upon large deformations. This pronounced nonlinear behavior stems from a significant separation between the stiffnesses…
Disordered networks of fragile elastic elements have been proposed as a model for inner porous regions of large bones [Gunaratne et.al., cond-mat/0009221]. In numerical studies, weakening of such networks is seen to be accompanied by…
Wearable exoskeletons can augment human strength and reduce muscle fatigue during specific tasks. However, developing personalized and task-generalizable assistance algorithms remains a critical challenge. To address this, a meta-imitation…
The elephant trunk exemplifies a natural gripper where structure, actuation, and sensing are seamlessly integrated. Inspired by the distal morphology of the African elephant trunk, we present MELEGROS, a Monolithic ELEphant-inspired GRipper…
Tendon-driven musculoskeletal humanoids typically have complex structures similar to those of human beings, such as ball joints and the scapula, in which encoders cannot be installed. Therefore, joint angles cannot be directly obtained and…
Various mathematical models represent the effects of local mechanical environment on the regulation of skeletal regeneration. Their relevance relies on an accurate description of the evolving mechanical properties of the regenerating…
Elongate limbless robots have the potential to locomote through tightly packed spaces for applications such as search-and-rescue and industrial inspections. The capability to effectively and robustly maneuver elongate limbless robots is…
Soft robots, inspired by elephant trunks or octopus arms, offer extraordinary flexibility to bend, twist, and elongate in ways that rigid robots cannot. However, their motion planning remains a challenge, especially in cluttered…
Wearable devices like exoskeletons are designed to reduce excessive loads on specific joints of the body. Specifically, single- or two-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) upper-body industrial exoskeletons typically focus on compensating for the…
A large number of complex systems find a natural abstraction in the form of weighted networks whose nodes represent the elements of the system and the weighted edges identify the presence of an interaction and its relative strength. In…
Many people could benefit from exoskeleton assistance during gait, for either medical or nonmedical purposes. But exoskeletons bring added mass and structure, which in turn require compensating for. In this work, we present a lightweight,…
Motivated by a possible convergence of terrestrial limbless locomotion strategies ultimately determined by interfacial effects, we show how both 3D gait alterations and locomotory adaptations to heterogeneous terrains can be understood…