Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Adaptive Motion of Animals and Machines (AMAM 2025)

Exploring how animals and humans excel in adaptive movements, particularly locomotion, provides valuable insights for engineers seeking to enhance the adaptive capabilities of robots. In turn, robots serve as scientific tools to investigate the fundamental principles of biological systems, especially the neuromechanical mechanisms behind their remarkable motor abilities. This “adaptive intelligence” can be harnessed to design robots that improve our lives by assisting with locomotion. To comprehensively address the understanding of biological movement, the design of bioinspired robots, and their applications in assisting both humans and animals, we have merged the 12th AMAM symposium with the 2nd LokoAssist symposium, forming the AMAM/LokoAssist 2025 Symposium. This event is dedicated to fostering fruitful interactions among biologists, engineers, and other researchers interested in adaptive motion. Previous AMAM symposia have been held in locations including Montreal, Canada (2000); Kyoto, Japan (2003); Ilmenau, Germany (2005); Cleveland, USA (2008); Awaji, Japan (2011); Darmstadt, Germany (2013); Cambridge, USA (2015); Sapporo, Japan (2017); Lausanne, Switzerland (2019); Virtual Platform (2021); and Kobe, Japan (2023). By addressing the interdisciplinary challenge of integrating active locomotion devices—such as orthoses, exoskeletons, and prostheses—into the daily movement experience of users, LokoAssist will extend AMAM’s focus on locomotion assistance applications. The first LokoAssist Symposium was held in Darmstadt (2023). This AMAM/LokoAssist 2025 Symposium aims to bring together researchers from fields such as robotics, biomechanics, neuroscience, sports science, neurophysiology, brain science, prosthetics, and other disciplines related to adaptive behavior in both biological and artificial systems.