Publicaties

One of the great ongoing debates in palaeo-anthropology is when, and how, hominids acquired habitual bipedal locomotion. The newly adopted bipedal gait and the ancestral quadrupedal gait are most often considered as very distinct, with each habitual locomotor mode showing corresponding anatomical adaptations. Bonobos (Pan paniscus), along with common chimpanzees (P. troglodytes), are the closest living relatives to humans and their locomotion is ...

Lameness is still an important problem in modern dairy farming. Human observation of locomotion, by looking at different traits in one go, is used in practice to assess locomotion. The objectives of this article were to determine which individual locomotion traits are most related to locomotion scores in dairy cows, and whether experienced raters are capable of scoring these individual traits consistently. Locomotion and 5 individual locomotion ...

Trade-offs arise when two functional traits impose conflicting demands on the same design trait. Consequently, excellence in one comes at the cost of performance in the other. One of the most widely studied performance trade-offs is the one between sprint speed and endurance. Although biochemical, physiological and (bio) mechanical correlates of either locomotor trait conflict with each other, results at the whole-organism level are mixed. Here, ...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility and validity of an automated image processing method to detect the locomotion of pigs in a group housed environment and under experimental conditions. Topview video images were captured for forty piglets, housed ten per pen. On average, piglets had a weight of 27 kg (SD=4.4 kg) at the start of experiments and 40 kg (SD=6.5) at the end. Each pen was monitored by a topview CCD camera. ...

The ostrich (Struthio camelus) is the largest extant biped. Being flightless, it exhibits advanced cursorial abilities primarily evident in its characteristic speed and endurance. In addition to the active musculoskeletal complex, its powerful pelvic limbs incorporate passive structures wherein ligaments interact with joint surfaces, cartilage and other connective tissue in their course of motion. This arrangement may enable energy conservation ...

Fish swimming is probably one of the most studied and best understood locomotor behaviors in vertebrates. However, many fish also actively exploit sediments. Because of their elongate body shape, anguilliform fishes are not only efficient swimmers but also very maneuverable. Consequently, many species live in complexly structured environments near the bottom and many are known to burrow into the sediment. To better understand burrowing and ...

Background: Discovered on the southern margin of the North Sea Basin, "Phoca" vitulinoides represents one of the best-known extinct species of Phocidae. However, little attention has been given to the species ever since its original 19th century description. Newly discovered material, including the most complete specimen of fossil Phocidae from the North Sea Basin, prompted the redescription of the species. Also, the type material of "Phoca" ...

Intrauterine undernutrition in humans typically results in low birth weight ([small for gestational age] SGA) and delayed postnatal neuromotor maturation. Since SGA and intrauterine growth retardation are also common in domestic pigs, piglets are premised as models to study delayed motor development. Applied to the locomotor paradigm, however, questions emerge: (i) how to map the developmental time scale of the precocial model onto the altricial ...

Classic control theory applied to compliant and soft robots generally involves an increment of computation that has no equivalent in biology. To tackle this, morphological computation describes a theoretical framework that takes advantage of the computational capabilities of physical bodies. However, concrete applications in robotic locomotion control are still rare. Also, the trade-off between compliance and the capacity of a physical body to ...

In traditional robotics, model-based controllers are usually needed in order to bring a robotic plant to the next desired state, but they present critical issues when the dimensionality of the control problem increases and disturbances from the external environment affect the system behavior, in particular during locomotion tasks. It is generally accepted that the motion control of quadruped animals is performed by neural circuits located in the ...