Walking Robots and the Central and Peripheral Control of Locomotion in Insects

From the abstract: "Control of insect walking can be considered hierarchical and modular." The interest of this quote, for me, will be determining what meaning he makes for each of those words. Modular means something like 'the system can be meaningfully conceptualized as having parts with well defined actions' heirarchical is something like 'A module can either be a leaf or a node. Node modules influence the action of, and are influenced by, some set of other modules, said to be at a lower level, some of which may be leaves.' I have to look closer if this definition of module and heirarchy allows modules at the same level to interact. This definition of heirarchy allows the 'influenced by' because his thinking includes sensory feedback, so this definition of heirarchy does not imply strictly top-down control.

This paper is a sort of 'biology for engineers' , he even schematically abstracts out all the details of all the different ganglia by putting them into three functional boxes with arrows going back and forth. Delcomyn is an engineer's entomologist

The lack of notes through most of this paper suggests that I fell asleep and haven't read most of it yet, but there are lots of notes at the end.

"Furthermore, it is also not clear which elements of insect locomotor control are actually critical for the extraordinary agility and adaptability exhibitied by insects as they traverse rugged terrain.