Publication

Locomotion Dynamics for Bio-inspired Robots with Soft Appendages: Application to Flapping Flight and Passive Swimming

Publications associées (30)

Biohybrid Superorganisms—On the Design of a Robotic System for Thermal Interactions With Honeybee Colonies

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Raphael Cherfan

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where collaboration and division of labor enhance survival of the whole colony, and are thus considered “superorganisms”. Historically, studying behaviors involving ...

2024

Neuromechanical Simulations of Animats with Decentralised Control

Jonathan Patrick Arreguit O'Neill

The transition from aquatic to terrestrial environments represents a significant event in the history of evolution. For this transition to occur, animals had to adapt their morphology, physiology and locomotory skills to handle the challenges and interacti ...

EPFL2023

Puppeteer and Marionette: Learning Anticipatory Quadrupedal Locomotion Based on Interactions of a Central Pattern Generator and Supraspinal Drive

Auke Ijspeert, Milad Shafiee Ashtiani, Guillaume Denis Antoine Bellegarda

Quadruped animal locomotion emerges from the interactions between the spinal central pattern generator (CPG), sensory feedback, and supraspinal drive signals from the brain. Computational models of CPGs have been widely used for investigating the spinal co ...

IEEE2023

Beyond undulation! Body morphology and sensing components of elongated animals and robots reveal skills to maintain competent locomotion

Laura Isabel Paez Coy

Locomotion is an essential evolutive innovation of living beings that allows them to colonize and dominate the planet. As diverse as animal morphologies are (living) and were (extinct), their locomotion modalities are also diverse. In particular, animal mo ...

EPFL2023

Exploration-based model learning with self-attention for risk-sensitive robot control

Sudong Lee

Model-based reinforcement learning for robot control offers the advantages of overcoming concerns on data collection and iterative processes for policy improvement in model-free methods. However, both methods use exploration strategy relying on heuristics ...

2023

Morphological flexibility in robotic systems through physical polygon meshing

Jamie Paik, Christoph Heinrich Belke, Kevin Andrew Holdcroft, Alexander Thomas Sigrist

Shape-changing robots adapt their own morphology to address a wider range of functions or environments than is possible with a fixed or rigid structure. Akin to biological organisms, the ability to alter shape or configuration emerges from the underlying m ...

Nature Portfolio2023

The effects of kinematics, flexibility, and planform on the vortex formation and aerodynamic performance of flapping wing flight

Alexander Gehrke

In this thesis, the aerodynamic challenges in flapping wing flight are addressed. In particular, the effects of different wing kinematics, flexibilities, and planforms on the the leading edge vortex development and aerodynamic performance are investigated. ...

EPFL2023

Human-Robot Swarm Interaction: An Explorative Path to Foster Complex Systems Understanding

Hala Khodr

Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...

EPFL2023

The neuromechanics of animal locomotion: From biology to robotics and back

Auke Ijspeert, Pavan P Ramdya

Robotics and neuroscience are sister disciplines that both aim to understand how agile, efficient, and robust locomotion can be achieved in autonomous agents. Robotics has already benefitted from neuromechanical principles discovered by investigating anima ...

AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE2023

Identification of the trade-off between speed and efficiency in undulatory swimming using a bio-inspired robot

Auke Ijspeert, Laura Isabel Paez Coy, Kamilo Andres Melo Becerra, Karen Ann J Mulleners, Alexandros Anastasiadis, Eric Daniel Tytell

Anguilliform swimmers, like eels or lampreys, are highly efficient swimmers. Key to understanding their performances is the relationship between the body’s kinematics and resulting swimming speed and efficiency. But, we cannot prescribe kinematics to livin ...

Nature Research2023