Title of masterclass: Locomotion
The remarkable ability of animals to crawl, swim, fly, walk, and run in all sorts of conditions and terrains is readily evident in the natural world. All of these forms of locomotion, as well as all others, in nature are primarily composed of gaits i.e., cyclic shape changes in an animal's joints that transport the organism through the environment. Despite recent successes of locomoting robots, such as Boston Dynamics' Petman and Bigdog, animal mobility outpaces artificial locomoters. This discrepancy arises because most artificial locomotion demonstrations are based on empirically-derived controllers that allow a system to work in a specific, well-defined environment. The contrasting broad efficacy of natural motions, along with the abstraction that they transform shape changes to position changes, suggests that gaits should play an equally important role in artificial locomotion, especially in environments inhospitable to conventional wheeled devices.
In this master class, we will discuss the physics of locomotion. We will analyze simple models of biological systems that use difference modes to traverse a variety of environments, from swimming to crawling to digging. We will extract fundamental physical principles and scaling laws associated with the various locomotion strategies, and finally discuss how these principles may be adopted in engineering design.
