Embodied intelligence solves the centipede's dilemma

TL;DR

This paper presents a dynamical model showing how centipedes actively modulate body stiffness to coordinate leg movements and optimize speed and efficiency, emphasizing the role of physical embodiment in locomotion control.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model integrating body mechanics and musculature, revealing how active stiffness tuning enables effective coordination and locomotion in centipedes.

Findings

Coordination depends on body stiffness tuned to stepping frequency.

Overly flexible or rigid bodies reduce speed and efficiency.

Centipedes modulate body stiffness actively for optimal locomotion.

Abstract

Although commonly associated with limbless animals like snakes and fish, multi-legged organisms like centipedes also utilize undulatory locomotion. Whether these undulations are actively reinforced or resisted by the axial musculature remains an open question. We present a dynamical model of centipede locomotion that integrates leg-ground interactions, passive body mechanics, and active lateral musculature. By varying stepping rate, actuation, and body stiffness, we examine how locomotor strategies affect speed and an effective energetic efficiency. Coordination emerges only when body stiffness is tuned to stepping frequency: overly flexible bodies lose synchrony, while overly rigid ones move slowly and inefficiently. This leads to the prediction that centipedes utilize speed dependent active stiffness to maintain this coordination. Our results suggest that lateral muscles also have a speed dependent function, revealed by optimizing speed and an effective cost, that resists a phase lag between leg touchdowns and body curvature. Together, we find that centipedes actively modulate body mechanics to achieve rapid, efficient locomotion, highlighting how complex control can emerge from embodied physical properties rather than solely from neural computation.