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Propelling and perturbing appendages together facilitate strenuous ground self-righting

Terrestrial animals must self-right when overturned on the ground, but this locomotor task is strenuous. To do so, the discoid cockroach often pushes its wings against the ground to begin a somersault which rarely succeeds. As it repeatedly attempts this, the animal probabilistically rolls to the si...

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Autores principales: Othayoth, Ratan, Li, Chen
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8315797/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34231466
http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.60233
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author Othayoth, Ratan
Li, Chen
author_facet Othayoth, Ratan
Li, Chen
author_sort Othayoth, Ratan
collection PubMed
description Terrestrial animals must self-right when overturned on the ground, but this locomotor task is strenuous. To do so, the discoid cockroach often pushes its wings against the ground to begin a somersault which rarely succeeds. As it repeatedly attempts this, the animal probabilistically rolls to the side to self-right. During winged self-righting, the animal flails its legs vigorously. Here, we studied whether wing opening and leg flailing together facilitate strenuous ground self-righting. Adding mass to increase hind leg flailing kinetic energy increased the animal’s self-righting probability. We then developed a robot with similar strenuous self-righting behavior and used it as a physical model for systematic experiments. The robot’s self-righting probability increased with wing opening and leg flailing amplitudes. A potential energy landscape model revealed that, although wing opening did not generate sufficient kinetic energy to overcome the high pitch potential energy barrier to somersault, it reduced the barrier for rolling, facilitating the small kinetic energy from leg flailing to probabilistically overcome it to self-right. The model also revealed that the stereotyped body motion during self-righting emerged from physical interaction of the body and appendages with the ground. Our work demonstrated the usefulness of potential energy landscape for modeling self-righting transitions.
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spelling pubmed-83157972021-07-28 Propelling and perturbing appendages together facilitate strenuous ground self-righting Othayoth, Ratan Li, Chen eLife Physics of Living Systems Terrestrial animals must self-right when overturned on the ground, but this locomotor task is strenuous. To do so, the discoid cockroach often pushes its wings against the ground to begin a somersault which rarely succeeds. As it repeatedly attempts this, the animal probabilistically rolls to the side to self-right. During winged self-righting, the animal flails its legs vigorously. Here, we studied whether wing opening and leg flailing together facilitate strenuous ground self-righting. Adding mass to increase hind leg flailing kinetic energy increased the animal’s self-righting probability. We then developed a robot with similar strenuous self-righting behavior and used it as a physical model for systematic experiments. The robot’s self-righting probability increased with wing opening and leg flailing amplitudes. A potential energy landscape model revealed that, although wing opening did not generate sufficient kinetic energy to overcome the high pitch potential energy barrier to somersault, it reduced the barrier for rolling, facilitating the small kinetic energy from leg flailing to probabilistically overcome it to self-right. The model also revealed that the stereotyped body motion during self-righting emerged from physical interaction of the body and appendages with the ground. Our work demonstrated the usefulness of potential energy landscape for modeling self-righting transitions. eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd 2021-07-07 /pmc/articles/PMC8315797/ /pubmed/34231466 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.60233 Text en © 2021, Othayoth and Li https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Physics of Living Systems
Othayoth, Ratan
Li, Chen
Propelling and perturbing appendages together facilitate strenuous ground self-righting
title Propelling and perturbing appendages together facilitate strenuous ground self-righting
title_full Propelling and perturbing appendages together facilitate strenuous ground self-righting
title_fullStr Propelling and perturbing appendages together facilitate strenuous ground self-righting
title_full_unstemmed Propelling and perturbing appendages together facilitate strenuous ground self-righting
title_short Propelling and perturbing appendages together facilitate strenuous ground self-righting
title_sort propelling and perturbing appendages together facilitate strenuous ground self-righting
topic Physics of Living Systems
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8315797/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34231466
http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.60233
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