Physical Principles of Obstacle Avoidance in Undulatory Locomotion
We are already familiar with the phenomenon of wave diffraction where waves spread out after encountering an obstacle or opening of size comparable to their wavelength.
It is interesting to observe how undulatory organisms exhibit a similar phenomenon (scattering around obstacles) when the same experiment is repeated multiple times and the resulting trajectories are superimposed as they encounter an obstacle.
I have proposed a novel control strategy called reflective control that successfully replicates the scattering phenomenon in undulatory organisms.
In my recent publication I showed the effectiveness of the reflective control in avoiding obstacles even in complex unstructured environments.
The reflective control provides a framework to exploit physical intelligence for efficient and computationally inexpensive maneuvering through unstructured environments.
