A unified energy-optimality criterion predicts human navigation paths and speeds.

ABSTRACT: Navigating our physical environment requires changing directions and turning. Despite its ecological importance, we do not have a unified theoretical account of non-straight-line human movement. Here, we present a unified optimality criterion that predicts disparate non-straight-line walking phenomena, with straight-line walking as a special case. We first characterized the metabolic cost of turning, deriving the cost landscape as a function of turning radius and rate. We then generalized this cost landscape to arbitrarily complex trajectories, allowing the velocity direction to deviate from body orientation (holonomic walking). We used this generalized optimality criterion to mathematically predict movement patterns in multiple contexts of varying complexity: walking on prescribed paths,

SUBMITTER: Brown GL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8307777 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature