Related papers: An Uncontrolled Toy That Can Walk But Cannot Stand…
Within minutes of birth a newborn gnu or giraffe works to stand and walk, asserting postural balance and organised animate behaviour in an apparently goal-directed manner. In contrast, robots learning to stand and walk from scratch begin…
Conventional mobile tensegrity robots constructed with straight links offer mobility at the cost of locomotion speed. While spherical robots provide highly effective rolling behavior, they often lack the stability required for navigating…
We propose a toy model with reversible mode coupling mechanism and with trivial Hamiltonian (and hence trivial statics). The model can be analyzed exactly without relying upon uncontrolled approximation such as the factorization…
It is shown that an internal control based on a moving indicator function is able to stabilize the state of parabolic equations evolving in rectangular domains. For proving the stabilizability result, we start with a control obtained from…
The paper shows sufficiency conditions for stability of continuous periodic orbits under phase uncertainty. Phase based uncertainty is a trait of bipedal walking robots, where the desired trajectories are parameterized by a monotonous…
Motivated by recent studies in human balance control, we study a delayed random walk with an unstable fixed point. It is observed that the random walker moves away from the unstable fixed point more slowly than is observed in the absence of…
In this paper, we propose a nonlinear control strategy for swinging up a pendulum to its upright equilibrium position by shaping its swinging energy along with regulating the cart to a desired location. While the base of a usual cart-pole…
If we consider a cat to be an isolated mechanical system governed by T-invariant mechanics, then its ability to land on its feet after being released from rest is incomprehensible. It is more appropriate to treat the cat as a creature that…
We consider the dynamics of a simple one dimensional model and we discuss the phenomenon of aging (i.e., the strong dependence of the dynamical correlation functions over the waiting time). Our model is the so-called random random walk, the…
Walking is a common bipedal and quadrupedal gait and is often associated with terrestrial and aquatic organisms. Inspired by recent evidence of the neural underpinnings of primitive aquatic walking in the little skate Leucoraja erinacea, we…
A class of planar bipedal robots with unique mechanical properties has been proposed, where all links are balanced around the hip joint, preventing natural swinging motion due to gravity. A common property of their equations of motion is…
Nonlinear control methodologies have successfully realized stable human-like walking on powered prostheses. However, these methods are typically restricted to model independent controllers due to the unknown human dynamics acting on the…
This paper presents a modular approach to motion planning with provable stability guarantees for robots that move through changing environments via periodic locomotion behaviors. We focus on dynamic walkers as a paradigm for such systems,…
This paper investigates the possibility of the motion control of a ball with a pendulum mechanism with non-holonomic constraints using gaits - the simplest motions such as acceleration and deceleration during the motion in a straight line,…
Discrete quantum walks are dynamical protocols for controlling a single quantum particle. Despite of its simplicity, quantum walks display rich topological phenomena and provide one of the simplest systems to study and understand…
The remarkable athletic intelligence displayed by humans in complex dynamic movements such as dancing and gymnastics suggests that the balance mechanism in biological beings is decoupled from specific movement patterns. This decoupling…
Functional autonomous systems often realize complex tasks by utilizing state machines comprised of discrete primitive behaviors and transitions between these behaviors. This architecture has been widely studied in the context of…
We describe the physics of an articulated toy with an internal source of energy provided by a spiral spring. The toy is a funny low cost kangaroo which jumps and rotates. The study consists of a mechanical and a thermodynamical analysis…
Random walks serve as important tools for studying complex network structures, yet their dynamics in cases where transition probabilities are not static remain under explored and poorly understood. Here we study nonlinear random walks that…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…