Cracking the Puzzle of Serpentine Motion

The counterintuitive and sinewy motions of snakes, stingrays, and skydivers represent a strange kind of motion that is notoriously hard to simulate, animate, or anticipate. All three types of locomotion—through sand, sea, and air—represent movement that relies on neither wings nor limbs but rather subtle and sometimes sudden changes of a body’s geometry.

Now researchers from Caltech and the Technical University of Berlin have created a crucial algorithm that can finally put such curiously complex motions into expressible forms. In …

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