Abstract. There is an increasing attention of exploiting compliant materials for the purpose of legged locomotion, because they provide significant advantages in locomotion performance with respect to energy efficiency and stability. Toward establishing a fundamental basis for this line of research, a minimalistic locomotion model of a single legged system is explored in this paper. By analyzin...

Much of what we know about the flexibility of the locomotor networks in vertebrates is derived from studies examining the adaptation of limb movements during stepping in various conditions. However, the body movements play important roles during locomotion: they produce the thrust during undulatory locomotion and they help to increase the stride length during legged locomotion. In this chapter,...

An animal moving through complex terrain must consider sensory cues around it and alter its movements accordingly. In the arthropod brain, the central complex (CC) receives highly preprocessed sensory information and sends outputs to premotor regions, suggesting that it may play a role in the central control of oriented locomotion. We performed tetrode recordings within the CC in cockroaches wa...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of non-steady locomotor activities on load predictability in two goat forelimb bones and to explore the degree to which bone curvature influences load predictability. We measured in vivo bone strains in the radius and metacarpus of juvenile goats performing a variety of natural behaviors in an outdoor arena and compared these strain magni...

In this paper we address a reconfiguration planning method for locomotion of a homogeneous modular robotic system and we conduct an experiment to verify that the planned locomotion can be realized by hardware. Our recently developed module is self-reconfigurable. A group of the modules can thus generate various three-dimensional robotic structures and motions. Although the module itself is a si...

This study tested the hypothesis that there has been an evolutionary increase in locomotor performance capacity at low temperature in nocturnal lizards. Nocturnal lizards are often active at low and suboptimal body temperatures. An evolutionary decrease in the minimum cost of locomotion could increase endurance capacity at low temperature, partially offsetting the thermal handicap of nocturnali...

The c-fos immunohistochemical method of activity-dependent labeling was used to localize locomotor-activated neurons in the adult cat spinal cord. In decerebrate cats, treadmill locomotion was evoked by electrical stimulation of the mesencephalic locomotor region (MLR). Spontaneous or MLR-evoked fictive locomotion was produced in decerebrate animals paralyzed with a neuromuscular blocking agent...

This paper studies the dynamics of foot–ground interaction in hexapod locomotion systems. For that objective the robot motion is characterized in terms of several locomotion variables and the ground is modelled through a non-linear springdashpot system, with parameters based on the studies of soil mechanics. Moreover, it is adopted an algorithm with footforce feedback to control the robot locom...

Locomotion is of fundamental importance in understanding adaptive behavior. In this paper we present two case studies of robot locomotion that demonstrate how higher level of behavioral diversity can be achieved while observing the principle of cheap design. More precisely, it is shown that, by exploiting the dynamics of the system-environment interaction, very simple controllers can be designe...

This paper uses geometric methods to study basic problems in the mechanics and control of locomotion. We consider in detail the case of \undulatory locomotion," in which net motion is generated by coupling internal shape changes with external nonholonomic constraints. Such locomotion problems have a natural geometric interpretation as a connection on a principal ber bundle. The properties of co...