The rat’s whiskers

A team of engineers from the Bristol Robotics Lab have unveiled a new ‘robot rat’ that can identify objects by the use of ‘whiskers’.

Called the SCRATCHbot, the project is part of the pan-european ICEA project which aims to develop artificially intelligent robots based on biological forms.

The Bristol Robotics Lab, which is a partnership between the University of the West of England and the University of Bristol, worked with Tony Prescott from the University of Sheffield's Department of Psychology to design ‘touch’ technologies which mirror how the brain interacts with sensory systems.

In this instance, a rat was chosen as they are particularly good at understanding their environment via the use of whiskers.  In a ‘sweep’ they can the position, shape and texture of objects.

This is a move away from most robot designs which use vision to identify their environments. Robots that do not rely on vision could have far-reaching capabilities in situations where light is poor.

Dr Tony Pipe from the University of the West of England, said “For a long time, vision has been the biological sensory modality most studied by scientists. But active touch sensing is a key focus for those of us looking at biological systems which have implications for robotics research. Sensory systems such as rats' whiskers have some particular advantages in this area. In humans, for example, where sensors are at the fingertips, they are more vulnerable to damage and injury than whiskers. Rats have the ability to operate with damaged whiskers and in theory broken whiskers on robots could be easily replaced, without affecting the whole robot and its expensive engineering.”

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