Locomotion emerges due to interactions between various subsystems such as sensory systems for vision. Rather than analyzing all the subsystems in detail which would be very complex, we use a metric that captures some property of the interactions between them. Our chosen metric is centralization which measures the coupling between neuromechanical modules that mediate responses […]
Slow-flapping (also called synchronous) insects use their nervous system to tell the wings how fast to flap. This is how your muscles work as well – muscle contraction is synchronous with a neural signal to the desired muscle. Unfortunately, this mode of actuation does not scale past 100 contractions per second, due to fundamental tradeoffs […]
Centimeter-scale flapping flight is an extremely power-intensive way to get around, because it requires powerful, muscle-driven movement at high frequencies. The fastest insects flap their wings at nearly 1000 times per second! Since the discovery of elasticity in the insect thorax, it has been thought that insects flap at their resonant frequency to fly efficiently, […]
Animals perform a plethora of robust, agile movements in natural environments by actuating and coordinating many muscles. However, the nervous system has a limited set of signals—action potentials in motor neurons—to control and execute these movements. Hawk moths use an especially sparse set of motor commands, with only 10 muscles controlling all wing movements, and […]
How does the action of millions of molecular motors enable muscle, nature’s most versatile material, to power movement?One of the features that makes muscle so unique is the exquisite organization of millions of molecular motors into a highly regular protein lattice. Muscles contract via the interaction of many parallel protein fibers (actin & myosin) that […]
Temperature is one of the most important variables affecting an animal’s physiology. Animal’s thermoregulate in a variety of ways from behaviorally seeking out warmer or cooler parts of their habitat to having extensive heat exchange strategies in their circulatory systems. Large moths like Manduca sexta typically spend the first moments before flight performing a behavior […]
The established perspective of flight control in insects holds that their remarkable maneuverability arises from neural modulation of relatively small steering muscles acting in concert with the regular, clock-like activation of larger power muscles. Yet the power output of these main muscles is very sensitive to subtle timing changes in neural activation. To test if […]
In the previous project we altered the commands the cockroach’s brain was sending to its muscle in real-time while the animal was running or maintaining its posture. We found that the same muscle could have three different function even when activated by the same commands. These differences seemed to arise for the mechanical context in […]