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Motivation

Earthworms are too slow and look dull. But they have a lot of special things we can't expected. In addition to moving narrow space such as pipes, they can move to backforward and go up walls with mucus. It means that they are capable to adapt unpredictable conditions. When we get the mechanism of earthworm locomotion, we can use it for not only understanding evolution of animals but also constructing adaptable robot.

Approach

Through our observations of animals locomotion, we found that many animals likely perform locomotion by exploiting "TEGOTAE". TEGOTAE, a Japanese word that means reaction after the generation of some action. It seems that animals evaluate reaction forces from environment and exploit it for propultion. We focus on earthworm as our model from above-mentioned reasons and design a TEGOTAE-based decentralized control scheme of earthworm locomotion.