生態学：タコの観察がソフトロボットの設計に新たな着想を与えるかもしれない

A new method of monitoring octopuses in their own habitat offers insights into how their bodies move, reports a paper published in Nature. The findings could help engineers design more robust bio-inspired robots based on octopuses in the wild.

Octopuses offer great inspiration for soft robotics. They have eight arms that can each behave independently, with hundreds of suckers each, which allows the animals to easily manipulate objects. Observing octopuses in aquariums and individual arms in laboratories has provided engineers with some insight for biorobotic design, but observing their entire bodies in their home environments would allow researchers to study how the animal moves as one.

Kakani Katija and colleagues monitored the behaviour of octopuses using a remotely operated vehicle in Octopus Garden, located in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary off the coast of California, at depths of over 3,000 meters. They recorded the motion of 15 separate octopuses in three dimensions using a novel camera called EyeRIS. The data from the camera allowed the authors to study kinematics associated with the octopuses’ arm movement, and more specifically identify areas of curvature and strain. Specifically, the researchers observed Muusoctopus robustus (the pearl octopus) crawling by curling the end of an arm tightly to produce a ‘foot’ that anchored the animal to the seafloor.

The authors note that this observational study could help close a critical knowledge gap in soft robotic design. Likewise, they suggest that the EyeRIS camera they developed could aid in the non-invasive monitoring of other aquatic animals and fluid environments for other projects.