Self-organized Recovery of Coordinated Locomotion in Crickets via Prosthetic Limb Integration

Abstract

Distributed sensorimotor interactions facilitate the coordination of multi-legged locomotion in insects without centralized control, yet the mechanisms that allow coordinated locomotion to re-emerge following limb loss remain poorly understood. Here, we systematically evaluate the effects of leg amputation and the integration of prosthetic legs on walking coordination in crickets Gryllus bimaculatus. Spherical treadmill experiments revealed that leg amputation disrupts inter-leg phase coupling, decreases locomotor speed, and alters spatial foot placement in a state-dependent manner, indicating impaired load-mediated coordination. Prosthetic legs did not merely restore intact kinematics; instead, they selectively reinstated coherent temporal coordination and axis-specific spatial organization. This structured recovery illustrates that re-introducing mechanically relevant sensory constraints is sufficient to re-engage distributed coordination networks, even in the absence of anatomical integrity. The selective recovery of temporal over spatial coordination, demonstrated here quantitatively for the first time, reveals the hierarchical architecture of distributed locomotion control and elucidates an embodied principle by which sensory-mechanical feedback facilitates the self-organization of resilient multi-legged locomotion following morphological intervention. Load-mediated sensory signals thus emerge as a key driver of distributed coordination in biohybrid systems, providing design principles for adaptive prosthetic engineering and sensorimotor rehabilitation.