Effective coordination and synchronization between processes remains a challenge that becomes even more important with the rise of multicore hardware. This thesis introduces Octopus, a coordination service for the Barrelfish operating system. Octopus addresses the problem of coordination between concurrent processes or activities in Barrelfish. The Octopus design is influenced by ideas from dis...

The anatomical and biophysical specializations of octopus cells allow them to detect the coincident firing of groups of auditory nerve fibers and to convey the precise timing of that coincidence to their targets. Octopus cells occupy a sharply defined region of the most caudal and dorsal part of the mammalian ventral cochlear nucleus. The dendrites of octopus cells cross the bundle of auditory ...

We aimed to develop alternative fishing gear for catching the common octopus, to decrease the use of bait and operating costs in comparison to commercial net pots. A tubular-type pot was designed, and behavioral responses of the common octopus were experimentally monitored in tank and replicated 10 times to compare fishing performances between 300 experimental and 300 commercial net pots in the...

This paper presents a platform named Octopus that facilitates the building and execution of mobile agent based applications. It presents the key ideas of how agents embed the computational task and how they cooperate to find the solution. The Octopus is presented with its key mechanisms used to sustain and execute the agents. The cornerstones of the Octopus design are described in detail, givin...

The octopus arm presents peculiar features, like the capability of bending in all directions, producing fast elongations, and varying its stiffness. Such features are very attractive from a robotics point of view. In the octopus, these unique motor capabilities are given by the peculiar muscular structure of the octopus arm, named muscular hydrostat, that creates a sort of antagonistic mechanis...

In this study, we focus on the intelligent behavior of an octopus and describe the development of a flexible manipulator. By using the developed manipulator, we show that grasping behaviors similar to those of an octopus can be realized by the dynamics of the body without computation in its brain. Keywords-flexible manipulator; octopus; many degrees of freedom; grasping.

Cephalopods are renowned for changing the color and pattern of their skin for both camouflage and communication. Yet, we do not fully understand how cephalopods control the pigmented chromatophore organs in their skin and change their body pattern. Although these changes primarily rely on eyesight, we found that light causes chromatophores to expand in excised pieces of Octopus bimaculoides ski...

The octopus is an interesting model for the development of soft robotics, due to its high deformability, dexterity and rich behavioural repertoire. To investigate the principles of octopus dexterity, we designed an eight-arm soft robot and evaluated its performance with focused experiments. The OCTOPUS robot presented here is a completely soft robot, which integrates eight arms extending in rad...

The electrophoretic analysis of egg yolk proteins of the mollusc Octopus vulgaris by both SDSand nativePAGE, showed two different patterns that mirror the two main periods characterizing the reproductive cycle of the female of Octopus vulgaris: the non-vitellogenic period (October-February) and the vitellogenic period (March-July). Since different levels of progesterone also characterize these ...