Functionality of Octopus Arm MusclesTeleah Hancer, Biomedical Engineering

Mentor: Hamid Marvi, Ph.D.School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy

Background Methods

Challenges

Acknowledgement

BIRTH Lab

o Motivation: Bio-inspired soft robotics is a relatively new and emerging field that offers unprecedented robotic adaptability and flexibility in complex environments.

o Objective: Advance the development and versatility of soft robotics by validating and making new discoveries about the functionality of each muscle group in an octopus arm.

Protocol 1) Anesthetize octopus2) Amputate arm3) Insert unipolar probes 4) Suspend arm 5) Execute stimulation trials6) Analyze EMG signals and

captured motion7) Dissect for probe

identification

Sincere gratitude to Dr. Marvi and fellow team members for the mentorship and support. Also special thanks to Dr. Beigzadehfor experiment and signal processing help and Dr. Fisher’s lab for conducting the octopus imaging studies.

Results

Figure 2: MRI section from proximal region of the arm

(Courtesy of Fisher Lab).

Figure 3: Processed and filtered EMG signal from longitudinal left muscle group in

bending motion towards left.

These results verify the ability to use EMG to accurately understand the motor control ability of each muscle. The pairwise comparisons results support the hypothesis that the right longitudinal muscle will be significantly more activated than the other muscles during a right bending motion. More trials will need to be performed to obtain evidence for the other hypotheses of shortening, elongation, and other variations of bending.

o Inconsistent reactivityo Mitigating noises o Precise probe placemento Processing evoked EMG data

Figure 1: Experimental setup

Conclusion

Figure 4: Statistical analysis of power values obtained from EMG data of right bending motion resulting from mechanical

stimulation (2 specimens, 2 arms, 12 total trials) .