SHREWBOT: Inspired by the tiny, nocturnal Etruscan shrew, this robot has a whisker array that comes close to the real thing. BRISTOL ROBOTICS LAB
While a graduate student at the University of Sheffield in 1992, cognitive neuroscientist Tony Prescott attended a robotics conference in Hawaii. There he saw innumerable animal-mimicking robots. Hexapod robots showed off their insect-like mobility by roaming the halls during meeting breaks. One robot even sported a compound eye composed of about a dozen individual lenses and sensors, just like the more numerous ommatidia of an insect eye.
Up until that point, Prescott had focused purely on simulations, using computers to model how brains process information. But after interacting with all the robots at that conference, “I really got interested in building physical robots instead,” he says. “That, to me, was very exciting—this idea that you could actually build a physical robot that could copy aspects ...
