ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
A unified energy-optimality criterion predicts human navigation paths and speeds.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- Modeling the journey as well as the destination: a control theory account of rotational navigation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Effects of unexpected underfoot perturbations during turning on measures of mediolateral stability and corresponding recovery strategies.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Faster fowl fall frequently: speed and force regulation during turning maneuvers by guinea fowl on high and low friction terrains.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- OpenMetabolics: Estimating energy expenditure using a smartphone worn in a pocket.Communications engineering · 2026Article
- Predictive use of environmental regularities requires action relevance.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- A low-cost markerless motion capture system to automate functional gait assessment: Feasibility study.PloS one · 2026Article
- How tp1, an indirect wing steering muscle, stabilizesbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Older adult frontal plane balance during 90 degree turns while walking.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Overground gait transitions are not sharp but involve gradually changing walk-run mixtures even over long distances.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Natural variability can increase human walking metabolic costs and its implications to simulation-based metabolic estimation.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- James-Stein Estimator Improves Accuracy and Sample Efficiency in Human Kinematic and Metabolic Data.Annals of biomedical engineering · 2025Article
- Behavioural risk models explain locomotor and balance changes when walking at virtual heights.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Behavioural energetics in human locomotion: how energy use influences how we move.The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Review
- Adapting lateral stepping control to walk on winding paths.Journal of biomechanics · 2025Article
- Review
- Perturbation-based estimation of within-stride cycle metabolic cost.Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation · 2024Article
- Motor "laziness" constrains fixation selection in real-world tasks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Curvilinear walking elevates fall risk and modulates slip and compensatory step attributes after unconstrained human slips.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Walking on Real-world Terrain with an Ankle Exoskeleton in Cerebral Palsy.IEEE transactions on medical robotics and bionics · 2024Article
- Human foot form and function: variable and versatile, yet sufficiently related to predict function from form.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
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3 authors.
Funding
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, turning in place, navigating an angled corridor, navigating freely with end-point constraints, walking through doors, and navigating around obstacles. In these tasks, humans moved at speeds and paths predicted by our optimality criterion, slowing down to turn and never using sharp turns. We show that the shortest path between two points is, counterintuitively, often not energy-optimal, and, indeed, humans do not use the shortest path in such cases. Thus, we have obtained a unified theoretical account that predicts human walking paths and speeds in diverse contexts. Our model focuses on walking in healthy adults; future work could generalize this model to other human populations, other animals, and other locomotor tasks.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.