  The octopus arm is a neuromechanical system that involves a complex interplay
between peripheral nervous system (PNS) and arm musculature. This makes the arm
capable of carrying out rich maneuvers. In this paper, we build a model for the
PNS and integrate it with a muscular soft octopus arm. The proposed
neuromuscular architecture is used to qualitatively reproduce several
biophysical observations in real octopuses, including curled rest shapes and
target-directed arm reaching motions. Two control laws are proposed for
target-oriented arm motions, and their performance is compared against a
benchmark. Several analytical results, including rest-state characterization
and stability properties of the proposed control laws, are provided.
