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Legged robots modeled after insects have been proposed for use on rugged, dangerous, or inaccessible terrain. The agility of current hexapod robots, however, is not yet as good as that of their biological counterparts. The capability of insects for agile locomotion is likely due mainly to the rich variety of sensory information that is provided by sense organs in their legs. In this article we review the characteristics and distri bution of insect leg sense organs in terms that are relevant to researchers interested in designing agile, insect-like, walking robots, In insect locomotion, three classes of mechanosensory organs seem to play an important role in sensory feedback: detectors of leg movement, detectors of external contact, and detectors of leg stress. We review the properties of these types of sense organs and describe their functional roles in the con trol of locomotion.

Campaniform sensilla (cs) on insect legs are stimulated by strain in the cuticle produced by forces applied to the leg, and generate action potentials when the strain is suciently high. We modeled the tibia of the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana, as a hollow, circular tube and developed a simulation of cs responses to external forces by solving equations of mechanics as applied to the leg to obtain values for stress and strain, then converting strain to action potentials. Based on the close correspondence between our simulated responses and the 1981 physiological results of Zill and Moran, we suggest that our model may be useful in assessing the performance of experimentally inaccessible cs groups during walking.

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