The robotic rat’s whiskers

Scientists’ uncover why whiskers ‘feel’ better than fingertips.

A multinational team of scientists have constructed a robotic rat to discover why its whiskers are more touch-sensitive than a human’s fingertips. By developing innovative ‘touch technologies,’ the robotics and brain researchers from Europe, USA and Israel have developed a robotic rat’s whiskers to answer this question.
 
The scientists found that whiskers actively sweep back and forth repetitively, accumulating information about its surrounding environment. The sensing begins in the neurons at the whiskers’ bases, which then fire signals off to the brain.
 
Furthermore, experiments have shown that the way in which a rat uses its whiskers is context-dependent. For example, the act of feeling out a 3D object requires three different types of code, each encoding a different dimension: the horizontal, the vertical, and the radial (distance from the whisker base). The horizontal plane is encoded in the precise timing of neural signals relative to the whisking motion. The vertical is encoded by the vertical spacing of the whiskers, which are arranged grid-like on either side of the snout. The radial plane, on the other hand, is encoded in the number of times the neurons fire, that is, the closer an object is to the rat's snout, the higher the number of neuron-signalling spikes.

Parallel pathways

The consortium’s research also suggests that the signals travel from the whiskers through parallel pathways that function within parallel closed feedback loops, constantly monitoring the signals they receive and changing their responses accordingly.
 
Professor Ehud Ahissar of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Neurobiology Department in Israel, whose research team is one of the groups participating in the multinational project, said: “'The aim of this research is to help gain a better understanding of the brain on the one hand, and advance technology on the other. That is to say, researchers can use robots as an experimental tool, by building a brain-like system, step-by-step, gaining insights into the workings of the brain’s inside components.”

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