An Instantaneous Optimal Control for Bird Neck With the Cosserat rod Model

The bird neck is an excellent stabilizing structure in nature. Inspired of this, the dynamics of the bird neck are modeled with the Cosserat rod theory. To help reveal the mechanisms behind the head stabilization, an instantaneous optimal control (IOC) framework for the elastic Cosserat rod is proposed. Then, the head stabilization problem is approximated for a series of IOC problems at each time step. Based on the discrete variational principle, the control inputs can be obtained by solving the IOC problems. Finally, numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method, and propagation wave appears in the instantaneous optimal controls.