Whisking with robots from rat vibrissae to biomimetic technology for active touch

This article summarizes some of the key features of the rat vibrissal system, including the actively controlled sweeping movements of the vibrissae known as whisking, and reviews the past and ongoing research aimed at replicating some of this functionality in biomimetic robots

The Emergence of Action Sequences from Spatial Attention: Insight from Rodent-Like Robots

Animal behaviour is rich, varied, and smoothly integrated. One plausible model of its generation is that behavioural sub-systems compete to command effectors. In small terrestrial mammals, many behaviours are underpinned by foveation, since important effectors (teeth, tongue) are co-located with foveal sensors (microvibrissae, lips, nose), suggesting a central role for foveal selection and foveation in generating behaviour. This, along with research on primate visual attention, inspires an alternative hypothesis, that integrated behaviour can be understood as sequences of foveations with selection being amongst foveation targets based on their salience. Here, we investigate control architectures for a biomimetic robot equipped with a rodent-like vibrissal tactile sensing system, explicitly comparing a salience map model for action guidance with an earlier model implementing behaviour selection. Both architectures generate life-like action sequences, but in the salience map version higher-level behaviours are an emergent consequence of following a shifting focus of attention

Empirically inspired simulated electro-mechanical model of the rat mystacial follicle-sinus complex

In whiskered animals, activity is evoked in the primary sensory afferent cells (trigeminal nerve) by mechanical stimulation of the whiskers. In some cell populations this activity is correlated well with continuous stimulus parameters such as whisker deflection magnitude, but in others it is observed to represent events such as whisker-stimulator contact or detachment. The transduction process is mediated by the mechanics of the whisker shaft and follicle-sinus complex (FSC), and the mechanics and electro-chemistry of mechanoreceptors within the FSC. An understanding of this transduction process and the nature of the primary neural codes generated is crucial for understanding more central sensory processing in the thalamus and cortex. However, the details of the peripheral processing are currently poorly understood. To overcome this deficiency in our knowledge, we constructed a simulated electro-mechanical model of the whisker-FSC-mechanoreceptor system in the rat and tested it against a variety of data drawn from the literature. The agreement was good enough to suggest that the model captures many of the key features of the peripheral whisker system in the rat

Perception of simple stimuli using sparse data from a tactile whisker array

We introduce a new multi-element sensory array built from tactile whiskers and modelled on the mammalian whisker sensory system. The new array adds, over previous designs, an actuated degree of freedom corresponding approximately to the mobility of the mystacial pad of the animal. We also report on its performance in a preliminary test of simultaneous identification and localisation of simple stimuli (spheres and a plane). The sensory processing system uses prior knowledge of the set of possible stimuli to generate percepts of the form and location of extensive stimuli from sparse and highly localised sensory data. Our results suggest that the additional degree of freedom has the potential to offer a benefit to perception accuracy for this type of sensor. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Self-adaptive context aware audio localization for robots using parallel cerebellar models

An audio sensor system is presented that uses multiple cerebellar models to determine the acoustic environment in which a robot is operating, allowing the robot to select appropriate models to calibrate its audio-motor map for the detected environment. The use of the adaptive filter model of the cerebellum in a variety of robotics applications has demonstrated the utility of the so-called cerebellar chip. This paper combines the notion of cerebellar calibration of a distorted audio-motor map with the use of multiple parallel models to predict the context (acoustic environment) within which the robot is operating. The system was able to correctly predict seven different acoustic contexts in almost 70% of cases tested

The robot vibrissal system: Understanding mammalian sensorimotor co-ordination through biomimetics

Chapter 10 The Robot Vibrissal System: Understanding Mammalian Sensorimotor Co-ordination Through Biomimetics Tony J. Prescott, Ben Mitchinson, Nathan F. Lepora, Stuart P. Wilson, Sean R. Anderson, John Porrill, Paul Dean, Charles ..