Why are dogs of interest to human geneticists? Dog breeds display an extraordinary amount of variation in skeletal structure, including overall size, leg length and width, and variants of skull shape. Breeds thus present geneticists with great opportunities for studying the genetics underlying common traits that have become fixed as part of various breed standards. Many traits were selected bec...

Complex systems and complex missions take years of planning and force launches to become incredibly expensive. The longer the planning and the more expensive the mission, the more catastrophic if it fails. The solution has always been to plan better, add redundancy, test thoroughly and use high quality components. Based on our experience in building ground based mobile robots (legged and wheele...

BACKGROUND New national growth references have been published in Belgium and Norway. The WHO recommends universal use of their 2006 Child Growth Standards based on data from breastfed children. OBJECTIVE To compare the growth of Belgian and Norwegian children with the WHO standards. PARTICIPANTS 6985 children 0-5 years of age from Belgium and Norway. DESIGN Proportion of children below -2...

This paper proposes a new model of a one-legged hopping robot. The one-legged hopping robot is useful in realizing rapid movement such as that of a running animal. Although it has a simple leg mechanism, the dynamics are not simple and require non-linear complex analysis. This means that it is not easy to derive a controller for stable hopping in a systematic way. Therefore, a dynamics-based ap...

This two-part paper discusses the analysis and control of legged locomotion in terms of N-step capturability: the ability of a legged system to come to a stop without falling by taking N or fewer steps. We consider this ability to be crucial to legged locomotion and a useful, yet not overly restrictive criterion for stability. In this part (Part 1), we introduce a theoretical framework for asse...

Legged robots are well suited t o walk on dif icult terrains at the expense of requiring complex control syst ems to walk even on flat surfaces. But simply walking on a fiat surface is not worth using a legged robot. I t should be assumed that walking on abrupt terrain is the typical situation for a legged robot. Wi th this premise in mind, we have developed a robust controller f o r a six-legg...

The Basilisk Lizard’s striking ability to sustain highly dynamic legged locomotion on a range of surfaces from hard-ground to water is a remarkable feat [1]. Most legged robots would have di culty emulating this animal’s ability to robustly locomote on yielding or deforming surfaces. Therefore, to explore the dynamics of legged locomotion in this regime, we are studying the design of a bio-insp...

In this paper, we report on a new stability analysis for hybrid legged locomotion systems based on factorization of return maps. We apply this analysis to a family of models of the Spring Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP) with different leg recirculation strategies. We obtain a necessary condition for the asymptotic stability of those models, which is formulated as an exact algebraic expression d...

Traditional, standards-based approaches to certification are hugely expensive, of questionable credibility when development is outsourced, and a barrier to innovation. This paper is a call and a manifesto for new approaches to certification. We start by advocating a goal-based approach in which unconditional claims delivered by formal methods are combined with other evidence in multi-legged cas...