Biological snakes’ diverse locomotion modes and physiology make them supremely adapted for environment. When their unique movements are broadly classified, the following four gliding modes exist: 1) Serpentine locomotion; 2) Rectilinear locomotion; 3) Concertina locomotion; 4) Side winding locomotion. However, the serpentine locomotion is the movement seen typically in almost all kinds of snake...

Biology has always been a source of inspiration and ideas for the robotics community. Legged locomotion problem is not an exception, and many experiences have taken ideas from animals, both for morphological and behavioral issues. The first ideas for gait generation came from animal observation, but they were mainly focused on mimicking legs movements. It was not until the nineties that the fir...

It has been shown that the collective action of non-experts can compete favorably with an individual expert or an optimization method on a given problem. However, the best method for organizing collective problem solving is still an open question. Using the domain of robotics, we examine whether cooperative search for design strategies is superior to individual search. We use a web-based robot ...

There are many fundamentally different mechanical motions that a system can use to achieve locomotion. Two standard examples are the wheels on a car or the legs of an artificial ant, but many others exist as well. As with all systems, there is an obvious desire to quantify how "well" each locomotion method performs. Unfortunately, as with many metrics, this is far from being a welldefined probl...

Mobile robots are envisioned to cooperate closely with humans and to integrate seamlessly into a shared environment. For locomotion, these environments resemble traversable areas which are shared between multiple agents like humans and robots. The seamless integration of mobile robots into these environments requires accurate predictions of human locomotion. This work considers optimal control ...

In order to evolve in an environment designed for humans, a humanoid robot (or simply humanoid) is supposed capable of performing different motions depending on the given situation. With the walking paradigm in a mature stage, in recent years, the attention of many researchers has passed to more complicated locomotion modes. Some examples are: climbing stairs (Harada et al., 2004), falling down...

The cortical, cerebellar and brainstem BOLD-signal changes have been identified with fMRI in humans during mental imagery of walking. In this study the whole brain activation and deactivation pattern during real locomotion was investigated by [(18)F]-FDG-PET and compared to BOLD-signal changes during imagined locomotion in the same subjects using fMRI. Sixteen healthy subjects were scanned at l...

In recent papers it has been suggested that human locomotion may be modeled as an inverse optimal control problem. In this paradigm, the trajectories are assumed to be solutions of an optimal control problem that has to be determined. We discuss the modeling of both the dynamical system and the cost to be minimized, and we analyze the corresponding optimal synthesis. The main results describe t...