Unlike the falling cat, lizards can right themselves in mid-air by a swing of their large tails in one direction causing the body to rotate in the other. Here, we developed a new three-dimensional analytical model to investigate the effectiveness of tails as inertial appendages that change body orientation. We anchored our model using the morphological parameters of the flat-tailed house gecko Hemidactylus platyurus. The degree of roll in air righting and the amount of yaw in mid-air turning directly measured in house geckos matched the model's results. Our model predicted an increase in body roll and turning as tails increase in length relative to the body. Tails that swung from a near orthogonal plane relative to the body (i.e. 0-30° from vertical) were the most effective at generating body roll, whereas tails operating at steeper angles (i.e. 45-60°) produced only half the rotation. To further test our analytical model's predictions, we built a bio-inspired robot prototype. The robot reinforced how effective attitude control can be attained with simple movements of an inertial appendage.

a b s t r a c tIt was demonstrated in two earlier papers that there exists a real, linear, time-varying transformation that decouples any non-defective linear dynamical system in free vibration in the configuration space. As an extension of this work, the present paper represents the first systematic effort to decouple defective systems. It is shown that the decoupling of defective systems is a rather delicate procedure that depends on the multiplicities of the system eigenvalues. While any defective system can be decoupled with the eigenvalues kept invariant, the geometric multiplicities of these eigenvalues may not be preserved. Several numerical examples are provided to illustrate the theoretical developments.

TitleThe decoupling of second-order linear systems with a singular mass matrix a b s t r a c tIt was demonstrated in earlier work that a nondefective, linear dynamical system with an invertible mass matrix in free or forced motion may be decoupled in the configuration space by a real and isospectral transformation. We extend this work by developing a procedure for decoupling a linear dynamical system with a singular mass matrix in the configuration space, transforming the original differential-algebraic system into decoupled sets of real, independent, first-and second-order differential equations. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the application of the decoupling procedure.

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A comprehensive study is reported herein for the evaluation of Lagrangian functions for linear systems possessing symmetric or nonsymmetric coefficient matrices. Contrary to popular beliefs, it is shown that many coupled linear systems do not admit Lagrangian functions. In addition, Lagrangian functions generally cannot be determined by system decoupling unless further restriction such as classical damping is assumed. However, a scalar function that plays the role of a Lagrangian function can be determined for any linear system by decoupling. This generalized Lagrangian function produces the equations of motion and it contains information on system properties, yet it satisfies a modified version of the Euler–Lagrange equations. Subject to this interpretation, a solution to the inverse problem of linear Lagrangian dynamics is provided.