Bioinspiration & biomimetics
Mar 8, 2021
Understanding how animals regulate their gait during locomotion can give biological insight and inspire controllers for robots. Why animals use the gallop at the highest speeds remains incompletely explained. Hypothesized reasons for galloping includ...
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Mar 3, 2021
Regular washing of public pavements is necessary to ensure that the public environment is sanitary for social activities. This is a challenge for autonomous cleaning robots, as they must adapt to the environment with varying pavement widths while avo...
Bioinspiration & biomimetics
Mar 1, 2021
Sandy beaches are areas that challenge robots of all sizes, especially smaller scale robots. Sand can hinder locomotion and waves apply hydrodynamic forces which can displace, reorient, or even invert the robot. Crab-like legs and gaits are well suit...
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Feb 5, 2021
Gait patterns are a result of the complex kinematics that enable human two-legged locomotion, and they can reveal a lot about a person's state and health. Analysing them is useful for researchers to get new insights into the course of diseases, and f...
Bioinspiration & biomimetics
Jan 25, 2021
The utility, efficiency, and reliability of legged robots has increased dramatically in recent years. Limbed robots are now capable of locomotion across a variety of terrains, however, achieving both rapid and efficient operation when ground conditio...
Faraday discussions
Jan 14, 2021
A central ambition of the robotics field has been to increasingly miniaturize such systems, with perhaps the ultimate achievement being the synthetic microbe or cell sized machine. To this end, we have introduced and demonstrated prototypes of what w...
Medical & biological engineering & computing
Jan 8, 2021
Recent learning strategies such as reinforcement learning (RL) have favored the transition from applied artificial intelligence to general artificial intelligence. One of the current challenges of RL in healthcare relates to the development of a cont...
Developmental science
Jan 4, 2021
What is the role of errors in infants' acquisition of basic skills such as walking, skills that require immense amounts of practice to become flexible and generative? Do infants change their behaviors based on negative feedback from errors, as sugges...
Frontiers in neural circuits
Dec 23, 2020
The mechanisms involved in generation of rhythmic locomotor activity in the mammalian spinal cord remain poorly understood. These mechanisms supposedly rely on both intrinsic properties of constituting neurons and interactions between them. A subset ...
Bioinspiration & biomimetics
Dec 21, 2020
A detailed model for the locomotory mechanics used by millipedes is provided here through systematic experimentation on the animal and validation of observations through a biomimetic robotic platform. Millipedes possess a powerful gait that is necess...