Code from: Competition between elasticity and adhesion in caterpillar locomotion

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in understanding animals locomotion mechanisms for developing bio-inspired micro- or nano-robots capable of overcoming obstacles and navigating in confined environments. Among non-pedal crawlers, caterpillars exhibit one of the most stable and efficient gait strategies, utilizing muscle contractions and substrate grip. Although several approaches have been proposed to model their locomotion, little is known about the competition between body elasticity and adhesion, which we demonstrate playing a central role in crawling gait. Preliminarily, experimental observations and measurements were performed on Pieris brassicae larvae, gaining insights into fundamental features characterizing caterpillar locomotion and estimating key geometrical and mechanical parameters. A minimal but effective one-dimensional discrete model was thus conceived to capture all the relevant aspects of the movement. Inter-mass springs model the deformable body units..., , , # Code from: Competition between elasticity and adhesion in caterpillar locomotion The provided code is divided into four distinct parts, each addressing a specific aspect of the modeling process for tracing back the one-dimensional caterpillar locomotion. For the users' utility, two files are given: the Mathematica notebook and its pdf print. **Part 1: Pre-processing Phase** In this initial phase, data is collected and stored to trigger the locomotion model. This includes the necessary parameters and conditions required to simulate the movement. Following the notation adopted in the paper, the same symbols are considered in the Mathematica notebook for representing the subunits mass, the inter-masses springs and Winkler-like constraints stiffness, the resting length of the springs, the displacement threshold, the damping coefficient, the damping ratio, and the inelastic trigger. **Part 2: Calculation of Potential Terms** This section computes the elastic and kinetic potential terms ...