Publication

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

Laura Isabel Paez Coy
2023
EPFL thesis
Abstract

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 morphologies with elongated bodies have existed on the planet since hundreds of millions of years ago. Many of them have been so successful that we can still find them. These morphologies also come in different sizes, making slight changes in how they move. However, all are influenced by the same physics of interaction with the environment. The focus of this work is precisely this mechanical interaction between elongated animals and their locomotion media. By the use of comparative biomechanics, mathematical models, and robotics, this work aims to elucidate different aspects of these elongated animals, ranging from their body structure and viscoelasticity to their sensor modalities, the rules for motion control based on interaction with the surrounding environment, their natural inherently behaviors dictated by physics, up to transitions of media and adaptation of body plans to different media. Several scientific questions and potential solutions are presented, as well as the development of engineered machines and other tools for testing such interactions as a proxy for the real animals, as experimenting directly with animals is challenging. In this work, the mathematical representation of the viscoelastic properties of a muscle implemented in a robot's motors allows it to perform more naturally and similarly to animals. Providing an understanding of how muscle properties impact performance. Furthermore, the combination of this muscle model, and force sensing working as exteroceptive local feedback wired to a model of a spinal cord, allowed the spontaneous generation of traveling waves, even in the absence of coupling between the spinal cord oscillators, which ultimately demonstrated the robustness present in eels and lampreys, even after spinal cord transections. On the other hand, I present a simplified model and experimental proof that morphological changes like adding fins to an elongated body reduce the rolling instability produced while swimming. Similarly, a simplified model related to the conservation of angular momentum adds new insights into the locomotion of large (for its size) payload volumes towards the head of animals with elongated bodies like mosquito larvae. Finally, a tool is presented to analyze comprehensively the kinematics of the center of mass that extract rich data from simple videos and structural compositions of elongated body animals. With the contributions of this work, namely experimental proofs, mathematical models, robot software, and designs, I attempt to provide state of the art in robotics and comparative biomechanics with a fresh view and novel approaches to different problems.

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Related concepts (42)
Animal
Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the biological kingdom Animalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, have myocytes and are able to move, can reproduce sexually, and grow from a hollow sphere of cells, the blastula, during embryonic development. As of 2022, 2.16 million living animal species have been described—of which around 1.05 million are insects, over 85,000 are molluscs, and around 65,000 are vertebrates—but it has been estimated there are around 7.
Robot locomotion
Robot locomotion is the collective name for the various methods that robots use to transport themselves from place to place. Wheeled robots are typically quite energy efficient and simple to control. However, other forms of locomotion may be more appropriate for a number of reasons, for example traversing rough terrain, as well as moving and interacting in human environments. Furthermore, studying bipedal and insect-like robots may beneficially impact on biomechanics.
Animal locomotion
Animal locomotion, in ethology, is any of a variety of methods that animals use to move from one place to another. Some modes of locomotion are (initially) self-propelled, e.g., running, swimming, jumping, flying, hopping, soaring and gliding. There are also many animal species that depend on their environment for transportation, a type of mobility called passive locomotion, e.g., sailing (some jellyfish), kiting (spiders), rolling (some beetles and spiders) or riding other animals (phoresis).
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