FIG. 3.

Whiskers with different profiles (shapes) are able to reach different regions of the 3D contact point space. All subplots in this figure were created by drawing surfaces at each discrete radial distance value, which makes the edges of the workspace appear to have “ripples.” Each panel represents the (x, y, z) point cloud of contact point locations that are reachable by four whiskers with different profiles: straight cylindrical, straight tapered, curved cylindrical, and curved tapered. Note that the tapers are not drawn to scale; they are for illustrative purposes only. Supplementary Video S1 shows these four point clouds rotating in 3D.