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Bioinspired Simulation of Knotting Hagfish

  • Yura Hwang
  • Theodore A. Uyeno
  • Shinjiro SuedaEmail author
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 11844)

Abstract

Hagfish are capable of not only forming knots, but also sliding them along the length of their bodies. This remarkable behavior is used by the animal for a wide variety of purposes, such as feeding and manipulation. Clearly of interest to biologists, this knotting behavior is also relevant to other fields, such as bioinspired soft robotics. However, this knot-sliding behavior has been challenging to model and has not been simulated on a computer. In this paper, we present the first physics-based simulation of the knot-sliding behavior of hagfish. We show that a contact-based inverse dynamics approach, motivated by the biological concept called positive thigmotaxis, works very well for this challenging control problem.

Keywords

Simulation Biology Physics-based Knots 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

We thank Austin Haney for helping to record video of knotting Pacific hagfish, Eptatretus stoutii and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife officer Donna Downs for their procurement. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (IOS-1354788 to T.A.U. and CAREER-1846368 to S.S.).

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Copyright information

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  • Yura Hwang
    • 1
  • Theodore A. Uyeno
    • 2
  • Shinjiro Sueda
    • 1
    Email author
  1. 1.Department of Computer Science and EngineeringTexas A&M UniversityCollege StationUSA
  2. 2.Department of BiologyValdosta State UniversityValdostaGeorgia

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