Bipedal Locomotion of Lizards

Why go bipedal? Locomotion and morphology in Australian agamid lizards.

Bipedal locomotion by lizards has previously been considered to provide a locomotory advantage. We examined this premise for a group of quadrupedal Australian agamid lizards, which vary in the extent to which they will become bipedal. The percentage of strides that each species ran bipedally, recorded using high speed video cameras, was positively related to body size and the proximity of the b...

Comparative three-dimensional kinematics of the hindlimb for high-speed bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion of lizards

Although lizards have been model organisms for testing locomotor performance and in ecomorphological studies, the limb movements of lizards during high-speed locomotion are poorly understood. Thus, we quantified the three-dimensional kinematics of the hindlimb, body and tail for five morphologically distinct species of lizard during steady-speed locomotion near maximum sprinting speed (2-5 m s-...

Towards Muscle Driven Bipedal Locomotion

Multi-contact bipedal robotic locomotion

This paper presents a formal framework for achieving multi-contact bipedal robotic walking, and realizes this methodology experimentally on two robotic platforms: AMBER2 and ATRIAS. Inspired by the key feature encoded in human walking— multi-contact behavior—this approach begins with the analysis of human locomotion and uses it to motivate the construction of a hybrid system model representing ...

Bipedal locomotion in crawling cells.

Many complex cellular processes from mitosis to cell motility depend on the ability of the cytoskeleton to generate force. Force-generating systems that act on elastic cytoskeletal elements are prone to oscillating instabilities. In this work, we have measured spontaneous shape and movement oscillations in motile fish epithelial keratocytes. In persistently polarized, fan-shaped cells, retracti...