The octopus arm is a neuromechanical system that involves a complex interplay between peripheral nervous system (PNS) and arm musculature. This makes the arm capable of carrying out rich maneuvers. In this paper, we build a model for the PNS and integrate it with a muscular soft octopus arm. The proposed neuromuscular architecture is used to qualitatively reproduce several biophysical observations in real octopuses, including curled rest shapes and target-directed arm reaching motions. Two control laws are proposed for target-oriented arm motions, and their performance is compared against a benchmark. Several analytical results, including rest-state characterization and stability properties of the proposed control laws, are provided.
@article{arxiv.2211.06767,
title = {Modeling the Neuromuscular Control System of an Octopus Arm},
author = {Tixian Wang and Udit Halder and Ekaterina Gribkova and Mattia Gazzola and Prashant G. Mehta},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.06767},
year = {2025}
}