Abstract:
It is often conjectured that some principle of optimality underlies animal behavior. In particular, many people think that animals move and locomote in a way that minimizes some scalar measure of metabolic cost, subject to physiological contraints. While these hypotheses have been tested in some gross studies, more rigorous tests require, (apart from a good model of cost), an ability to predict optimal motions accurately.
I will give a short overview of a formulation of such optimization (-- * optimal control * --) problems, and give a description of the methods and strategies that we propose to use to solve such problems accurately.