Whiskerbot: A Robotic Active Touch System Modeled on the Rat Whisker Sensory System
Adaptive Behavior - Animals, Animats, Software Agents, Robots, Adaptive Systems
BRAHMS: Novel middleware for integrated systems computation
Advanced Engineering Informatics
SAB'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Simulation of adaptive behavior: from animals to animats
Adaptive cancelation of self-generated sensory signals in a whisking robot
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
SAB'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Simulation of adaptive behavior: from animals to animats
Mapping with sparse local sensors and strong hierarchical priors
TAROS'11 Proceedings of the 12th Annual conference on Towards autonomous robotic systems
Biomimetic tactile target acquisition, tracking and capture
Robotics and Autonomous Systems
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The rodent vibrissal (whisker) system is one of the most widely investigated model sensory systems in neuroscience owing to its discrete organisation from the sensory apparatus (the whisker shaft) all the way to the sensory cortex, its ease of manipulation, and its presence in common laboratory animals. Neurobiology shows us that the brain nuclei and circuits that process vibrissal touch signals, and that control the positioning and movement of the whiskers, form a neural architecture that is a good model of how the mammalian brain, in general, coordinates sensing with action. In this paper we describe SCRATCHbot, a biomimetic robot based on the rat whisker system, and show how this robot is providing insight into the operation of neural systems underlying vibrissal control, and is helping us to understand the active sensing strategies that animals employ in order to boost the quality and quantity of information provided by their sensory organs.