Shrewbot, BIOTACT project (BIOmimetic Technology for vibrissal Active Touch)

As featured on BBC 1 - The One Show, 20 January 2012

The Etruscan shrew is nocturnal, relying on its whiskers to find, track and capture its prey - often the same size as itself. The efficiency of this tiny creature has inspired scientists to look at ways of replicating the shrew's whiskers to enable robots to find their way around without the use of vision.

The Shrewbot has been developed at Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) in collaboration with the University of Sheffield Active Touch Laboratory as part of the BIOTACT project, Professor Tony Pipe (UWE Bristol) and Professor Tony Prescott (University of Sheffield) are working on the Shrewbot project with a number of partners.

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Building a computer model of the human brain isn't enough for cognitive roboticist Murray Shanahan. Meet "Shrewbot," the robot that uses whiskers to get around, patterned on those of the Etruscan shrew.

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“Visual-Tactile Sensory Map Calibration of a Biomimetic Whiskered Robot,” by Tareq Assaf, Emma D. Wilson, Sean Anderson, Paul Dean, John Porrill, and Martin J. Pearson from the University of Bristol, University of the West of England, and University of Sheffield, U.K. Presented at ICRA 2016.

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