, to interpret its activity as detecting a perceptual situation or driving a motor response. This approach, seemingly inescapable in the 1960s, became untenable, but there were no concrete alternatives. Evoked potential techniques gave only a gross average of activity, too vague to pin down mechanisms, and early

mechanism used for task-level locomotion control. Furthermore, these data highlight the critical role of mechanical analyses in addition to widely used kinematic analyses in the study of neural control systems. Key words: electroreception; closed-loop model; Gymnotiformes; ribbon fin; sensorimotor control

This un-edited manuscript has been accepted for publication in Biophysical Jour-nal and is freely available on BioFast at

Abstract Obese individuals are advised to engage in daily physical activity to improve health and manage body weight. Walking is the most popular form of physical activ-ity, yet the effects of obesity on the biomechanics of walking are still being discovered. In this review, I highlight recent research that has found that childhood and adult obesity are associated with slower level walking speeds, wider steps, and greater loads across lower extremity joints. Given the likely increase in risk of musculoskeletal injury/pathology in obese individuals, clinicians should use caution when rec-ommending brisk walking as a form of physical activity. I also address how improvements in our ability to measure and model musculoskeletal actions as well as further cross-sectional and longitudinal studies will enhance our under-standing of how obesity affects our ability to perform es-sential locomotor tasks.

Abstract—A new non-invasive low cost method for accelerations measurement in biped locomotion mechanisms is presented. The aim is to measure all the joint accelerations of the locomotion system during the walking that is difficult because of the nonaccessibility of several joint axes. Our

In this paper, the authors describe the design and control of RHex, a power autonomous, untethered, compliant-legged hexapod robot. RHex has only six actuators—one motor located at each hip— achieving mechanical simplicity that promotes reliable and robust operation in real-world tasks. Empirically

it easily with small size. In this paper, a novel bio-mimetic micro robot with simple mechanism using shape memory alloy (SMA) is introduced to generate earthworm-like locomotive motion. There have been many kinds of mobile micro robot using the SMA. However, these actuators generally require electric cable

ABSTRACT An effective control method that achieves movement over a small ridge as an example of three-dimensional (3D) snake-like creeping locomotion is presented. The creeping robot is modeled as a continuum with zero thickness capable of generating bending moment at arbitrary points. Under a

neural networks are a viable mechanism for adaptive agent control and that the genetic algorithm can be used to evolve effective neural controllers. A significant advantage of this approach is that one need specify only a measure of an agent’s overall performance rather than the precise motor output

. Robotic locomotion is based in a variety of instances upon cyclic changes in the shape of a robot mechanism. Certain variations in shape exploit the constrained nature of a robot's interaction with its environment to generate net motion. This is true for legged robots, snakelike robots