Legged locomotion is attractive because it can enable a robot to traverse far more varied terrain than a wheeled rover is capable of. In the context of planetary exploration, this is especially attractive as the sites of greatest scientific interest tend to be characterized by difficult terrain. For example, it would be extremely difficult for a wheeled rover to make its way into a lunar crater...

Neurons in mouse V1 increase their response to visual stimulation during locomotion. In this issue of Neuron, Lee et al. (2014) show that subthreshold optogenetic stimulation of a brainstem locomotion area can mimic the effect of locomotion on sensory processing.

Through their ability to navigate and perform tasks in unstructured environments, robots have made their way into applications like farming, earth moving, waste clean-up and exploration. All mobile robots use locomotion that generates traction, negotiates terrain and carries payload. Well-designed robotic locomotion also stabilizes a robot’s frame, smooths the motion of sensors and accommodates...

Through their ability to navigate and perform tasks in unstructured environments, robots have made their way into applications like farming, earth moving, waste clean-up and exploration. All mobile robots use locomotion that generates traction, negotiates terrain and carries payload. Well-designed robotic locomotion also stabilizes a robot’s frame, smooths the motion of sensors and accommodates...

This paper presents a method for automated detection of complex (non-self-avoiding) postures of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and its application to analyses of locomotion defects. Our approach is based on progressively detailed statistical models that enable detection of the head and the body even in cases of severe coilers, where data from traditional trackers is limited. We restrict th...

Using a treadmill to monitor locomotion is extremely convenient for sport and exercise research (Nigg et al., 1995). A problem exists if kinematic, kinetic, and metabolic or other variables, for example, are not uniform between treadmill and overground locomotion. As Nigg et al. (1995) suggested discussion about the degree of similarity between overground and treadmill running is inconsistent t...

For a mobile robot undergoing serpentine locomotion, an accurate dynamic model is a fundamental requirement for optimization, control, navigation, and learning algorithms. Such algorithms can be readily implemented for traditional rigid robots, but remain a challenge for nonlinear and low-bandwidth soft robotic systems. This article addresses the theoretical modeling of the dynamics of a pressu...

Sophisticated multilayer neural networks have achieved state of the art results on multiple supervised tasks. However, successful applications of such multilayer networks to control have so far been limited largely to the perception portion of the control pipeline. In this paper, we explore the application of deep and recurrent neural networks to a continuous, high-dimensional locomotion task, ...

Insecticide resistance amongst disease vectors is a growing problem and novel compounds are needed. Biogenic amines are important for neurotransmission and we have recently shown a potential role for these in mosquito fertility. Here, we dissected the relative contribution of different aminergic signalling pathways to biological processes essential for vectorial capacity such as fertility, loco...

This paper deals with whole-body motion planning and dynamic control for humanoid from two aspects: locomotion including manipulation and reaching. In the first part, we address a problem of simultaneous locomotion and manipulation planning that combines a geometric and kinematic motion planner with a dynamic humanoid motion generator. The second part deals with whole-body reaching tasks by usi...