The Three Toothed Lamprey

The rook problem on saw-toothed chessboards

A saw-toothed chessboard, or STC for short, is a kind of chessboard whose boundary forms two staircases from left down to right without any hole inside it. A rook at square (i, j) can dominate the squares in row i and in column j . The rook problem of an STC is to determine the minimum number of rooks that can dominate all squares of the STC. In this paper, we model an STC by two particular gra...

Bayesian three-dimensional reconstruction of toothed whale trajectories: passive acoustics assisted with visual and tagging measurements.

The author describes and evaluates a Bayesian method to reconstruct three-dimensional toothed whale trajectories from a series of echolocation signals. Localization by using passive acoustic data (time of arrival of source signals at receptors) is assisted by using visual data (coordinates of the whale when diving and resurfacing) and tag information (movement statistics). The efficiency of the...

Lamprey Robots

We have developed a biologically based underwater, autonomous vehicle modeled after a simple vertebrate, the sea lamprey. The robot consists of a cylindrical Plexiglas electronics bay with a polyurethane undulator actuated by shape memory alloy artificial muscles. Sensors include a compass, pitch and roll inclinometers and sonar rangers, the signals of which are quantized into a labeled line co...

The spinobulbar system in lamprey.

Locomotor networks in the spinal cord are controlled by descending systems which in turn receive feedback signals from ascending systems about the state of the locomotor networks. In lamprey, the ascending system consists of spinobulbar neurons which convey spinal network signals to the two descending systems, the reticulospinal and vestibulospinal neurons. Previous studies showed that spinobul...

Body Muscles of the Lamprey