The emergent physics of animal locomotion

Abstract

Moths flitting between flowers on a moonlit night and cockroaches scurrying underfoot are dynamical systems. Like many other animals, they get around with a seeming ease and agility that we humans find hard to replicate in systems we create. It may seem that we ought to know everything there is to know about animal locomotion. But we have yet to meet Richard Feynman's provocative standard, "What I cannot create, I do not understand." The failure is not due to a limitation of our engineering abilities; rather, it reflects the difficulty of puzzling out how movement emerges from the physical and physiological systems of organisms. We cannot yet emulate the motility seen in nature nor derive the behavior.