The Dynamics of Legged Locomotion: Models, Analyses, and Challenges; Holmes, Full, Koditschek, Guckenheimer

This was the 100 pager, which i managed in one sitting, at the expense of section 5 (the meat) and lots of biophysics (boring). It was better than I was expecting, lots of leads and good insight.

This is a very impressive review consolidating work in modeling, analysis, robotics, biophysics and neuroethology. They cover a ridiculous array of methods and models, drawing from everywhere. It isn't quite my one stop reference shop, but it will provide many useful leads, and after I look closer at section 5, some tools too. The bias is towards running insects.

• Section 1 is introduction
• Section 2 reviews earlier work on locomotion and movement modeling, relevant machanical, biomechanical, neurobiologaical and robotics background.
• Section 3 summarizes experimental work on running and walking animcals
• Section 4 introduces analytic methods to be employed in section 5
• Section 5 solves some problems and provides procedures for answering some tricky questions.
• Section 6 has lots of great conclusions and directions

Comments

"Ultimate goal is to produce a "behaving insect"" That is without any reference to Brooks that I can determine.

Acknowledging role of engineer's optimization and reduction

Contrast "Completely actuated and sensed machines..whose stability can be established and tuned analytically...[requiring] a very high deegree of control authority" with "The analytically messier, "low-affordance" ... autonomous, dynamically stable ... preflexively stabilized...[with] centralized/decentralized feedforward/feedback lovomotion control architectures". Further: "a gulf remains between the performance we can elicit empirically and what mathmatical analyses or numberical simulations can explain." Brings up the interesting personal question. Is my role to work towards filling the gap? Right now, I think my goal will be to find tools that make researchers comfortable leaving the other ones behind.a

simulations are allowing empirical results to be trustworthy enough to replace theoretical results, in many cases.

A worried question: "Are coordination patterns unique within species?" Even if the answer is yes, the procedure each species followed to find the pattern is the same. The problem of designing distributed systems is making them design themselves.

To Read

• Hutchinson
• autopoesis, Manchuera? Bolera?
• Look into RHex