A continuum model of passive

A passive vibrissa (whisker) is modeled as an elastic bending rod that interacts with a rigid obstacle in the plane. Aim is to see details of what happens in quasistatically scanning the obstacle. To this end the differential equations emerging from Bernoulli’s rod theory are solved by elliptic integrals followed by numerical evaluation. As a supplement we consider the analogous scanning problem using a simple rigid body model for the vibrissa.