Investigating Octopus arm sensory receptors

The octopus have eight arms, baring each a large number of suckers, with theoretically infinite degrees of freedom and control them through a rather complex nervous system distributed between the central and the elaborated peripheral nervous system of the arm. Octopuses are very tactile animals and rely mostly on what is described as a contact-based chemo sensation [4] of their suckers. Like the octopus, today’s soft robots have a large number of degrees of freedom. A contact-based interaction is similarly used in soft-robotics to reduce the complexity of controlling a large number of degrees of freedom but challenges for robotics include the mechanics and sensing required to build such systems. Here we propose to investigate 1) the presence, structure and innervation pathway of the muscle proprioception in the octopus arm; 2) the structure and organization of mechano and chemical receptors of the octopus arm sucker.