Locomotion High Quality

Conclusion: Deterioration of locomotion skills is a significant problem in persons with CP from an early age, documenting the need for life-long follow-up. The predictors above should be investigated in further clinical studies, searching for potential causal pathways.

locomotion

The Locomotion Research Laboratory is focused on enhancing our fundamental and clinical understanding of the mechanics, energetics, and control of bipedal locomotion in humans and other bipeds. We pursue these goals through an integration of experimental and computer modeling techniques.

Locomotion Providers implement different types of locomotion. The package supplies multiple Locomotion Providers: the Teleportation Provider, the Snap Turn Provider, the Continuous Turn Provider, and the Continuous Move Provider, all of which implement the LocomotionProvider abstract class. These are discussed in more detail in the sections below.

You can use the Character Controller Driver to drive the height of a Character Controller on the Rig upon locomotion events emitted by, for example, a Continuous Move Provider. This can allow for the capsule collider of the Rig (that is, the user) to be automatically resized when the user crouches down or stands up and tries to move with a joystick. This can be useful, together with other Collider objects, to constrain the user from moving forward unless their head would be lower than an obstacle, for instance.

Abstract: Many inspirations for soft robotics are from the natural world, such as octopuses, snakes, and caterpillars. Here, we report a caterpillar-inspired, energy-efficient crawling robot with multiple crawling modes, enabled by joule heating of a patterned soft heater consisting of silver nanowire networks in a liquid crystal elastomer (LCE)-based thermal bimorph actuator. With patterned and distributed heaters and programmable heating, different temperature and hence curvature distribution are achieved, enabling bidirectional locomotion as a result of the friction competition between the front and rear end with the ground. The thermal bimorph behavior is studied to predict and optimize the local curvature of the robot under thermal stimuli. The bidirectional actuation modes, the crawling speed, and the capability of passing through obstacles with limited spacing are investigated by experiments and finite element analyses. The strategy of distributed and programmable heating and actuation with thermal responsive materials offers new capabilities for smart and multifunctional soft robots.

Anthony M. Pagano, Anthony M. Carnahan, Charles T. Robbins, Megan A. Owen, Tammy Batson, Nate Wagner, Amy Cutting, Nicole Nicassio-Hiskey, Amy Hash, Terrie M. Williams; Energetic costs of locomotion in bears: is plantigrade locomotion energetically economical?. J Exp Biol 15 June 2018; 221 (12): jeb175372. doi:

A plantigrade posture in which the heel makes contact with the ground during a step is considered to be an ancestral form of locomotion (Lovegrove and Haines, 2004). This posture has been shown to enhance locomotor economy while walking in humans, despite a reduced economy while running relative to digitigrade or unguligrade postures, which enable greater stride length and elastic storage (Carrier, 2016). Members of the family Ursidae represent the largest mammals to have retained a plantigrade posture (Brown and Yalden, 1973), which likely increases their dexterity for digging and climbing and enhances support for their large body mass (McLellan and Reiner, 1994), but may impose a reduced energetic economy during locomotion (Lovegrove and Haines, 2004; Shine et al., 2015).

To evaluate whether polar bears have uniquely high energetic costs of locomotion among ursids, we examined the metabolic rates of resting and locomotion in polar bears and grizzly bears. To do this, we measured the oxygen consumption, overall dynamic body acceleration (ODBA), stride length and stride frequency of captive polar bears and grizzly bears while at rest in a metabolic chamber and walking on a motorized treadmill. We tested the hypotheses that polar bears differ from grizzly bears in their relationships between speed and oxygen consumption, ODBA, stride length and stride frequency. We compared the costs of locomotion of polar bears and grizzly bears with respect to other plantigrade mammals and digitigrade carnivores, and with estimates based on allometric relationships. We further evaluated the relationship between oxygen consumption and ODBA in polar bears and grizzly bears as a proxy for energy expenditure. In other species, ODBA is strongly correlated with energy expenditure because of the relationship between acceleration and muscle contraction (Gleiss et al., 2011; Wilson et al., 2006), enabling the use of accelerometers to measure energy expenditure in wild animals (e.g. Gómez Laich et al., 2011; Halsey et al., 2009a, 2011; Williams et al., 2014; Wilson et al., 2006, 2012). For example, ODBA has been used to measure instantaneous energetics (e.g. Williams et al., 2014) and to evaluate the energy landscapes of wild animals (e.g. Shepard et al., 2013; Wilson et al., 2012). This is based on the assumption that movement is the primary factor influencing variability in energy expenditure (Costa and Williams, 1999; Gleiss et al., 2011; Wilson et al., 2006). If such relationships are similar in ursids, it could provide a method to remotely measure their energy expenditure. Lastly, we evaluated the locomotor speeds of polar bears walking and running on the sea ice to assess whether preferred locomotor speeds in the wild conform to our energetic predictions.

"This approach to driving motion in a soft robot is highly energy efficient, and we're interested in exploring ways that we could make this process even more efficient," Zhu says. "Additional next steps include integrating this approach to soft robot locomotion with sensors or other technologies for use in various applications -- such as search-and-rescue devices."

The Duke Animal Locomotion Laboratory, led by Professor Daniel Schmitt, uses laboratory-based in-vivo techniques to study biomechanics of vertebrate locomotion with a focus on mammals in general and nonhuman primates and humans specifically. Research focuses on general functional anatomy, evolutionary aspects of limb anatomy and gait choice, the evolution of primate locomotion, and human musculoskeletal health.

The study of locomotion informs many areas of science, medicine and technology. The mechanisms of locomotion may be applied in biomimetics (biomimicry), the development of human-made processes, substances, devices or systems that imitate nature. In robotics, for example, designers imitate human movement to create life-like androids.

Locomotion is also an important area of endeavor in video game art and design and virtual reality (VR). Creating realistic locomotion for digital content requires an understanding of how that movement is accomplished and what it looks like in the physical world. In VR gaming, locomotion usually refers to systems that allow the user to navigate through the virtual environment.

Locomotion is generally categorized according to one of four types of environment: terrestrial (on the earth), aerial (in the air), aquatic (in the water) or fossorial (in the earth). Types of animal locomotion include walking, running, crawling, rolling, flying, climbing, swimming, skipping and jumping.

1 There is a fundamental gap in our understanding of the circuit mechanisms underlying even simple naturalistic 2 behaviors, such as making a cup of coffee, which proceed through a sequential execution of sub-behaviors. 3 Continued existence of this gap represents an important problem because obtaining a circuit-level understand- 4 ing of complex multi-step behaviors is a necessary step toward unlocking the mysteries of healthy brain func- 5 tion and of disorders. The overarching goal is to obtain a circuit-level understanding of such naturalistic behav- 6 ior. The research objective here is to unravel the logic of sensorimotor transformation in the context of odor- 7 modulation of locomotion in Drosophila. The central hypothesis is that, like many of our own everyday actions, 8 control of odor-modulation of locomotion is hierarchical. A fly?s locomotion is built from simpler elements called 9 locomotor primitives, each of which lasts between 1-3 seconds (or 10-30 steps). Odors, instead of acting on 10 instantaneous locomotor parameters such as speed and angular speed, act on these locomotor primitives and 11 change the probability that the fly spends performing a given locomotor primitive. This hypothesis was formu- 12 lated on the basis of our previous work and preliminary data. The rationale for the proposed research is that 13 understanding odor-guided locomotion?a complex, flexible behavior?in the context of a genetically tractable 14 system will allow a precise delineation of the steps that underlie sensorimotor transformation in the context of a 15 naturalistic behavior. The hypothesis above will be tested by characterizing the circuit basis of modulation of 16 locomotion by food odors using a combination of techniques including imaging, electrophysiology, quantitative 17 behavior and computation. The proposed research has three specific aims. 1) To extract the locomotor primi- 18 tives and test the hypothesis that odors modulate locomotion by changing the time a fly spends performing dif- 19 ferent locomotor primitives. 2) To test the hypothesis that different ORN classes modulate the time spent in 20 distinct locomotor primitives. 3) To elucidate the role of lateral horn in odor modulation of locomotion. The re- 21 search is innovative because it employs sophisticated statistical tool (Hierarchical Hidden Markov model, 22 HHMM) and cutting-edge experimental tools in the context of a genetically tractable model organism to obtain 23 insights into naturalistic behaviors. The proposed research is significant because it will vertical advance our 24 understanding of sensorimotor processes involved in naturalistic behaviors. Insights from multiple fields have 25 all come to the conclusion that behavior is organized into discrete packets or behavioral primitives. Actions un- 26 fold by a sequential recruitment of these discrete packets. A critical barrier to the study of natural behavior is 27 that in most cases there is enough variability in these discrete packets to make them unrecognizable without 28 the help of sophisticated statistical tool. By deploying HHMM, we overcome this critical barrier. Besides repre- 29 senting a vertical advance in our understanding of naturalistic behavior, another possible positive outcome of 30 this study is better diagnosis of neurological conditioning that occur through improper sequencing of actions. 31 32 33 041b061a72