Outside laboratory conditions and human-made structures, animals rarely encounter flat
surfaces. Instead, natural substrates are uneven surfaces with height variation that ranges …

Birds are a diverse and agile lineage of vertebrates that all use bipedal locomotion for at
least part of their life. Thus birds provide a valuable opportunity to investigate how …

Cursorial ground birds are paragons of bipedal running that span a 500-fold mass range
from quail to ostrich. Here we investigate the task-level control priorities of cursorial birds by …

Ground-dwelling birds are typically characterized as erect bipeds having hind limbs that
operate parasagittally. Consequently, most previous research has emphasized …

In contrast to the upright trunk in humans, trunk orientation in most birds is almost horizontal
(pronograde). It is conceivable that the orientation of the heavy trunk strongly influences the …

Humans can run without falling down, usually despite uneven terrain or occasional pushes.
Even without such external perturbations, intrinsic sources like sensorimotor noise perturb …

Small animals and robots must often rapidly traverse large bump-like obstacles when
moving through complex 3D terrains, during which, in addition to leg-ground contact, their …

Animals alter their habitat use in response to the energetic demands of movement ('energy
landscapes') and the risk of predation ('the landscape of fear'). Recent research suggests …

Previous research has resulted in increasing insight into neuro-mechanical control
strategies during perturbed locomotion. In contrast, more general analyses on simple model …

The human knee behaves similarly to a linear torsional spring during the stance phase of
walking with a stiffness referred to as the knee quasi-stiffness. The spring-like behavior of …