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Biologically-Inspired Tactile Sensing
Figure 1: Prof. Cowan’s work on task-level control of antenna-based wall following in cockroaches, in collaboration with the PolyPEDAL Laboratory at UC Berkeley was featured on the cover of the Journal of Experimental Biology, May 2006, 209(9).
Description
Myriad creatures rely on compliant tactile arrays for locomotion control, mapping, obstacle avoidance and object recognition. Professor Noah Cowan’s LIMBS laboratory is designing tactile sensors, inspired by arthropod antennae. Like their biological analogs, these sensors should enable their host to negotiate cluttered environments in low light. These multifunctional, light weight, low power, "quiet" sensors complement existing proximity sensors, particularly in low-light, tight spaces with highly polished surfaces and high air- or water-particle content, where modalities such as infrared, sonar, vision and lasers fail.
The LIMBS laboratory has built several tactile antenna prototypes that have enabled us to develop and test controllers for wall following, obstacle avoidance and tactile map building. Our work, which stems from the basic science of tactile sensing for task-level control in cockroaches (Figure 1), reveals several unique engineering science challenges due to the unusual degree to which tactile sensor morphology (e.g. mass distribution, geometry, sensor loci, compliance, damping) interacts with robotic behavior (e.g. wall following, obstacle avoidance, map building).
Publications
J. Lee, S. Sponberg, O. Y. Loh, A. Lamperski, R. J. Full, and N. J. Cowan. Templates and Anchors for Antenna-Based Wall Following in Cockroaches and Robots. IEEE Transactions on Robotics (Special Issue on Bio-Robotics). In Press.
N. J. Cowan, J. Lee, and R. J. Full. Task-Level Control of Wall Following in the American Cockroach. J Exp Bio, 2006, 209(9), 1617-1629.
J. Lee, A. Lamperski, J. Schmitt, and N. J. Cowan. Task-Level Control of the Lateral Leg Spring Model of Cockroach Locomotion. Fast Motions in Biomechanics and Robotics: Optimization and Feedback Control (editors M. Diehl and K. Mombaur), Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2006.
N. J. Cowan, E. J. Ma, M. Cutkosky and R. J. Full. A biologically inspired passive antenna for steering control of a running robot. International Symposium on Robotics Research, Siena, Italy, 2003.
A. Lamperski, O. Loh, B. Kutscher and N. J. Cowan. Dynamical Wall-Following for a Wheeled Robot using a Passive Tactile Sensor. In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Barcelona, Spain, 2005.