Friday, October 01, 2004

Robot uses whiskers to get around. Real mouse whiskers help AMouse avoid obstacles - eventually rodent bots could scuttle though pipes to perform repairs. [New Scientist 9/30/2004]

Artificial Mouse Project (AMOUSE)
The whiskers consist of natural rat whiskers glued on capacitor microphones. Each whisker is thus a single sensor. Data acquisition is done on a laptop with a PCMCIA data acquisition card. So far, the artificial mouse has been used for experiments on the morphology of the whisker array. We looked for an optimal arrangement of the whiskers by comparing different morphologies as to how well the robot was able to avoid obstacles. We found that a different morphology than the one found in nature is optimal for this task.