Robot rat to lead the way in touch technology

The Norwegian rat and the Etruscan shrew, for example, use their whiskers to make sense of their environment. The mammals sweep their whiskers back and forth at high speeds in a controlled manner, allowing them to use touch signals alone to recognise familiar items, determine the shape and surface of objects, and track and capture prey.

Using their understanding of the animal kingdom, the team will develop two machines endowed with similar sensing capabilities, including a whiskered robot that can seek-out, identify and track fast-moving target objects.

Professor Prescott said: "Overall, our project will bring about a step-change in the understanding of active touch sensing and in the use of whisker-like sensors in intelligent machines. Today´s life-like machines, such as robots, don´t make effective use of touch. By learning from nature and developing technologies that do use this physical sense, our researchers will be able to enhance the capabilities of the machines of the future."

Notes for Editors: The BIOTACT (BIOmimetic Technology for vibrissal ACtive Touch) project will develop novel biomimetic computational methods and technologies for active touch sensing.

Project Partners include: Tony Prescott, Dept. of Psychology, University of Sheffield, UK (Co-ordinator); Ehud Ahissar, Weizmann Institute, Israel; Wulfram Gerstner, EPFL, Switzerland; Mathew Diamond, International School of Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy; Tony Pipe/Chris Melhuish, Bristol Robotics Lab, UK; Michael Brecht, Berlin Centre for Computational Neuroscience, Germany; David Golomb, Ben Gurion University, Israel; Patrick Pirim, Brain Vision Systems, Paris, France; Mitra Hartmann, Northwestern University, Chicago, USA.

The project is funded by the EU "Information Systems Technologies" theme, under the "Future Emerging Technologies" (FET) programme.