The researchers, including Professor Eva Kanso in USC Viterbi’s Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and Sina Heydari, a USC Viterbi Ph.D. Eva kanso usc how to#In other words, once the sea star provides an instruction on which way to move, the individual feet figure out how to achieve this on their own, without further communication. The answer, from researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, was recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface: sea star couple a global directionality command from a “dominant arm” with individual, localized responses to stimuli to achieve coordinated locomotion. For years, researchers have wondered exactly how a sea star accomplishes this synchronization, given it has no brain and a completely decentralized nervous system. These feet stretch and contract to attach to rough terrain, hold on to prey and, of course, move.Īny one tube foot on a sea star can act autonomously in responding to stimuli, but coupled together, they can synchronize their motion to produce a bouncing motion - their version of running. Have you ever seen a sea star move? To many of us, sea star seem motionless, like a rock on the ocean’s floor, but in actuality, they have hundreds of tube feet attached to their underbelly. The findings will help with the development of new robotic systems that utilize a decentralized component to learn hierarchically. It appears the nervous system relies on the physics of the interaction between the body and the environment to control movement. Summary: Much of a sea star’s locomotion is determined by local sensory-motor response at the tube feet level as opposed to global sensory-motor commands.
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