Whiskerbot: A Robotic Active Touch System Modeled on the Rat Whisker Sensory System

Abstract

The Whiskerbot project is a collaborative project between robotics engineers, computational neuroscientists and ethologists, aiming to build a biologically inspired robotic implementation of the rodent whisker sensory system. The morphology and mechanics of the large whiskers (macro-vibrissae) have been modeled, as have the neural structures that constitute the rodent central nervous system responsible for macro-vibrissae sensory processing. There are two principal motivations for this project. First, by implementing an artificial whisker sensory system controlled using biologically plausible neural networks we hope to test existing models more thoroughly and develop new hypotheses for vibrissal sensory processing. Second, the sensory mode of tactile whiskers could be useful for general mobile robotic sensory deployment. In this article the robotic platform that has been built is detailed as well as some of the experiments that have been conducted to test the neural control algorithms and architectures inspired from neuroethological observations to mediate adaptive behaviors.Keywords vibrissal active touch · computational neuroethology · bio-inspired robotics · field programmable gate array neural processing · sensorimotor control

Biomimetic tactile target acquisition, tracking and capture

“…Previous implementations of artificial whisker sensing, reviewed in [14,15], have shown them to be useful for navigation [16,17] as well as for object identification/localisation [5,[18][19][20]. At the same time, robots with whiskers are helping biologists to understand the nature of the task facing biological whisker specialists [15,21].…”

Contact type dependency of texture classification in a whiskered mobile robot

“…This feedback control system was adopted as it best fits both anatomical (no proprioception in mystacial musculature [14]) and ethological observations (contact mediated adaptation [24]) of rats. For further details of the robot whisker morphology, actuation, and transductions mechanisms see [26], [29].…”

“…As part of a more general investigation of functional capabilities of artificial whisker systems we previously constructed an active whisker array attached to a mobile robot platform [28,29], see figure 1. In this system each artificial whisker was a 200mm moulded glass-fibre composite rod approximately four times larger than, but respecting the general form of, a rat whisker, and gauged at the base to measure strain (bending) in two dimensions.…”

Biomimetic vibrissal sensing for robots

“…We next briefly review the design features and experimental results from a number of our earlier platforms before describing our latest robot. For further detail of these earlier systems see [14,16,[41][42][43].…”

“…Our first robot, Whiskerbot [41] (figure 1a), possessed a bilateral array of moulded glass fibre whiskers that were tapered and curved to resemble rat whiskers at approximately 4 Â the scale (200 mm). Each whisker was equipped with strain gauges to measure bending in two dimensions.…”