Can I get some octopus arms please! 🐙 😊 Could this be a breakthrough!
"Octopus arms coordinate nearly infinite degrees of freedom to perform complex movements such as reaching, grasping, fetching, crawling, and swimming. How these animals achieve such a wide range of activities remains a source of mystery, amazement, and inspiration. Part of the challenge comes from the intricate organization and biomechanics of the internal muscles."
".. researchers ... have developed a physiologically accurate model of octopus arm muscles. “Our model, the first of its kind, not only provides insight into the biological problem, but a framework for design and control of soft robots going forward,” ...
The team’s key insight was to express the arm musculature using a stored energy function, a concept borrowed from the theory of continuum mechanics. Postdoctoral scholar and corresponding author Udit Halder explained that, “The arm rests at the minimum of an energy landscape. Muscle actuations modify the stored energy function, thus shifting the equilibrium position of the arm and guiding the motion.”
Interpreting the muscles using stored energy dramatically simplifies the arm’s control design. In particular, the study outlines an energy-shaping control methodology to compute the necessary muscle activations for solving manipulation tasks such as reaching and grasping. When this approach was numerically demonstrated in the software environment Elastica, this model led to remarkably life-like motion when an octopus arm was simulated in three dimensions. ..."
Fromt the abstract:
"Flexible octopus arms exhibit an exceptional ability to coordinate large numbers of degrees of freedom and perform complex manipulation tasks. As a consequence, these systems continue to attract the attention of biologists and roboticists alike. In this article, we develop a three-dimensional model of a soft octopus arm, equipped with biomechanically realistic muscle actuation. Internal forces and couples exerted by all major muscle groups are considered. An energy-shaping control method is described to coordinate muscle activity so as to grasp and reach in three-dimensional space. Key contributions of this article are as follows: (i) modelling of major muscle groups to elicit three-dimensional movements; (ii) a mathematical formulation for muscle activations based on a stored energy function; and (iii) a computationally efficient procedure to design task-specific equilibrium configurations, obtained by solving an optimization problem in the Special Euclidean group SE(3). Muscle controls are then iteratively computed based on the co-state variable arising from the solution of the optimization problem. The approach is numerically demonstrated in the physically accurate software environment Elastica. Results of numerical experiments mimicking observed octopus behaviours are reported."
Reaching like an octopus: a biology-inspired model opens the door to soft robot control (I presume, this is the underlying article)
Energy-shaping control of a muscular octopus arm moving in three dimensions (no public access)
Credits: Last Week in AI
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