Following peripheral nerve sections some locomotor deficits appear which are gradually compensated for by spinal and supraspinal mechanisms. The present work is aimed at identifying contributions of both types of mechanisms. We performed a denervation of the left lateral gastrocnemius-soleus (LGS) muscles in three cats which was followed by a spinalization at the 13th thoracic segment. Three ot...

The simulation of damaged buildings is of great interest. Virtual-reality technologies allow us to experience such a situation. A main concern here is escaping from the building. To simulate this scenario, a model of the environment and an interface for locomotion are needed. Locomotion inside virtual buildings requires special input devices. This paper discusses several simulation methods for ...

My research focuses on social locomotion of computer-controlled, human-like, virtual agents in virtual reality applications. Two main areas are covered in the literature: a) user-agent-dynamics in, e.g., pedestrian scenarios and b) pure inter-agent-dynamics. However, joint locomotion of a social group consisting of a user and one to several virtual agents has not been investigated yet. I intend...

Control of legged locomotion across uneven terrain is poorly understood from a theoretical perspective, despite strong relevance to clinical and robotic applications. Gait research has typically examined locomotion on smooth and level surfaces with uniform steps. Identifying key gait parameters that permit agile locomotion across uneven surfaces could lead to a clearer understanding of control ...

We design two performance measures for a planar locomotion robot, modeled closely after the Platonic Beast. The first measure is proportional to the total motion of all joints during locomotion of the robot. This is a rough approximation to the energy consumption of the robot. The second measure determines the maximal speed of locomotion, for given limits on the joint speeds. We compute optimal...

In this paper a model is presented which describes an octopusinspired robot capable of two kinds of locomotion: crawling and bipedal walking. Focus will be placed on the latter type of locomotion to demonstrate, through model simulations and experimental trials, that the robot’s speed increases by about 3 times compared to crawling. This finding is coherent with the performances of the biologic...

Locomotion capabilities form the basis for accomplishing robotic exploration by a rover on an asteroid. While traditional locomotion gears, such as wheels and tracks, are promising candidates for traversing extraterrestrial terrains, their capabilities lower in such an environment due to its micro-gravity. Here, we propose a new idea of ciliary micro-hopping mechanism for an asteroid exploratio...

Abstract Biped robots are inherently unstable because of their complex kinematics as well dynamics. Despite many research efforts in developing biped locomotion, the performance locomotion is still far from expectations. This paper proposes a model-based framework to generate stable locomotion. The core this an abstract dynamics model which composed three masses consider stance leg, torso, and ...

The locomotion of Caenorhabditis elegans consists of forward crawling punctuated by spontaneous reversals. To better understand the important variables that affect locomotion, we have described in detail the locomotory behavior of C. elegans and identified a set of parameters that are sufficient to describe the animal's trajectory. A model of locomotion based on these parameters indicates that ...

Humans have an extremely redundant system for locomotion. To handle the redundancy problem, humans use coordinative structures using conditions of constraint in their joint movements to reduce the number of degrees of freedom, which is called kinematic synergy. This chapter shows some characteristics in the kinematic synergy in human locomotion and shows a locomotion control system for a biped ...