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Structural hierarchy, in which materials possess distinct features on multiple length scales, is ubiquitous in nature; diverse biological materials, such as bone, cellulose, and muscle, have as many as ten hierarchical levels. Structural…
Faced with complex and unstructured construction environments, wheeled and tracked robots exhibit significant limitations in terrain adaptability and flexibility, making it difficult to meet the requirements of autonomous operation.…
Chain molecules play important roles in industry and in living cells. Our focus here is on distinct ways of modeling the stiffness inherent in a chain molecule. We consider three types of stiffnesses -- one yielding an energy penalty for…
Typical leg exoskeletons employ open-loop kinematic chains with motors placed directly on movable joints; while this design offers flexibility, it leads to increased costs and heightened control complexity due to the high number of degrees…
The correlation properties of the nonaffine elastic response in strongly disordered materials are investigated using the theory of correlated random matrices and supported by numerical models. While the nonaffine displacement field itself…
Living biological tissue is a complex system, constantly growing and changing in response to external and internal stimuli. These processes lead to remarkable and intricate changes in shape. Modeling and understanding both natural and…
Mamba state-space models (SSMs) have recently outperformed state-of-the-art (SOTA) Transformer large language models (LLMs) in various tasks and been widely adapted. However, a major concern for stable learning in recurrent-based deep…
Continuum elasticity is a powerful tool applicable in a broad range of physical systems and phenomena. Yet, understanding how and on what scales material disorder may lead to the breakdown of continuum elasticity is not fully understood. We…
We propose a simple and practical approach for incorporating the effects of muscle inertia, which has been ignored by previous musculoskeletal simulators in both graphics and biomechanics. We approximate the inertia of the muscle by…
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…
Load-bearing tissues are typically fortified by networks of protein fibers, often with preferential orientations. This fiber structure imparts the tissues with direction-dependent mechanical properties optimized to support specific external…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed on complex reasoning tasks, yet little is known about their ability to internally evaluate problem difficulty, which is an essential capability for adaptive reasoning and efficient…
Networks of filamentous proteins play a crucial role in cell mechanics. These cytoskeletal networks, together with various crosslinking and other associated proteins largely determine the (visco)elastic response of cells. In this letter we…
Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on centralized processors. We introduce a rapid and autonomous…
Robotic systems are increasingly used in rehabilitation to provide high intensity training for patients with motor impairment. The results of controlled trials involving human subjects confirm the effectiveness of robot-enhanced methods and…
Musculoskeletal robots offer intrinsic compliance and flexibility, providing a promising paradigm for versatile locomotion. However, existing research typically relies on models with fixed muscle physiological parameters. This static…
Tails serve various functions in both robotics and biology, including expression, grasping, and defense. The vertebrate tails associated with these functions exhibit diverse patterns of vertebral lengths, but the precise mechanisms linking…
Lifelong learning and adaptability are two defining aspects of biological agents. Modern reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have shown significant progress in solving complex tasks, however once training is concluded, the found…
The organization of the axonal cytoskeleton is a key determinant of the normal function of an axon, which is a long thin projection away from a neuron. Under normal conditions two axonal cytoskeletal polymers microtubules and neurofilaments…