The centralization of locomotor control from weak and local coupling to strong and global is hard to assess outside of particular modeling frameworks. We developed an empirical, model-free measure of centralization that compares information between c...
Gram-scale insects, such as cockroaches, take advantage of the mechanical properties of the musculoskeletal system to enable rapid and robust running. Engineering gram-scale robots, much like their biological counterparts, comes with inherent constra...
Disaster robotics is a growing field that is concerned with the design and development of robots for disaster response and disaster recovery. These robots assist first responders by performing tasks that are impractical or impossible for humans. Unfo...
Recently, insect-machine hybrid robots have been developed that incorporate insects into robots or incorporate machines into insects. Most previous studies were motivated to use the function of insects for robots, but this technology can also prove t...
Randomness is common in biological and artificial systems, resulting either from stochasticity of the environment or noise in organisms or devices themselves. In locomotor control, randomness is typically considered a nuisance. For example, during dy...
The transition from the lab to natural environments is an archetypal challenge in robotics. While larger robots can manage complex limb-ground interactions using sensing and control, such strategies are difficult to implement on small platforms where...
To traverse complex terrain, animals often transition between locomotor modes. It is well known that locomotor transitions can be induced by switching in neural control circuits or driven by a need to minimize metabolic energetic cost. Recent work re...
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Many small bionic crawling robots have been invented for search and rescue missions in narrow spaces. However, their locomotion capability is far from that of insects of the same size. Transforming a cockroach into a bio-bot has been a hot topic in t...
Animals and robots must self-right on the ground after overturning. Biology research has described various strategies and motor patterns in many species. Robotics research has devised many strategies. However, we do not well understand the physical p...
In an effort to increase access to neuroscience education in underserved communities, we created an educational program that utilizes a simple task to measure place preference of the cockroach () and the open-source free software, SLEAP Estimates Ani...