From Rat Vibrissae to Biomimetic Technology for Active Touch

This article summarizes some of the key features of the rat vibrissal system, including the actively controlled sweeping movements of the vibrissae known as whisking, and reviews the past and ongoing research aimed at replicating some of this functionality in biomimetic robots.

[1]  E. Ahissar,et al.  Responses of trigeminal ganglion neurons to the radial distance of contact during active vibrissal touch. , 2006, Journal of neurophysiology.

[2]  Mark D. Humphries,et al.  Technical Integration of Hippocampus, Basal Ganglia and Physical Models for Spatial Navigation , 2008, Front. Neuroinform..

[3]  Anthony G. Pipe,et al.  Whiskerbot: A Robotic Active Touch System Modeled on the Rat Whisker Sensory System , 2007, Adapt. Behav..

[4]  James F. Wilson,et al.  A Whisker Probe System for Shape Perception of Solids , 1995 .

[5]  D. Simons,et al.  Biometric analyses of vibrissal tactile discrimination in the rat , 1990, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[6]  R. Andrew Russell,et al.  Recognising and manipulating objects using data from a whisker sensor array , 2005, Robotica.

[7]  D. Kleinfeld,et al.  'Where' and 'what' in the whisker sensorimotor system , 2008, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[8]  M. Brecht,et al.  Functional architecture of the mystacial vibrissae , 1997, Behavioural Brain Research.

[9]  H. Philip Zeigler,et al.  Whisker Deafferentation and Rodent Whisking Patterns: Behavioral Evidence for a Central Pattern Generator , 2001, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[10]  Per Magne Knutsen,et al.  Orthogonal coding of object location , 2009, Trends in Neurosciences.

[11]  David Kleinfeld,et al.  Active sensation: insights from the rodent vibrissa sensorimotor system , 2006, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[12]  P. Redgrave,et al.  Empirically inspired simulated electro-mechanical model of the rat mystacial follicle-sinus complex , 2004, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[13]  G. G. Stokes "J." , 1890, The New Yale Book of Quotations.

[14]  Stefan Schaal,et al.  A biomimetic whisker for texture discrimination and distance estimation , 2004 .

[15]  Mitra J. Z. Hartmann,et al.  Erratum: Right-Left asymmetries in the whisking behavior of rats anticipate head movements (Journal of Neuroscience (August 23, 2006) (8838-8846)) , 2006 .

[16]  Ieee Robotics,et al.  IEEE robotics & automation magazine , 1994 .

[17]  M. Hartmann,et al.  Mechanical Characteristics of Rat Vibrissae: Resonant Frequencies and Damping in Isolated Whiskers and in the Awake Behaving Animal , 2003, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[18]  Peter Redgrave,et al.  Layered Control Architectures in Robots and Vertebrates , 1999, Adapt. Behav..

[19]  M. Andermann,et al.  Embodied Information Processing: Vibrissa Mechanics and Texture Features Shape Micromotions in Actively Sensing Rats , 2008, Neuron.

[20]  E. Ahissar,et al.  Vibrissal Kinematics in 3D: Tight Coupling of Azimuth, Elevation, and Torsion across Different Whisking Modes , 2008, Neuron.

[21]  M. Brecht,et al.  Tactile guidance of prey capture in Etruscan shrews , 2006, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[22]  R.A. Russell,et al.  Using tactile whiskers to measure surface contours , 1992, Proceedings 1992 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[23]  Anthony G. Pipe,et al.  A Biomimetic Haptic Sensor , 2005 .

[24]  Joseph H. Solomon,et al.  Biomechanical models for radial distance determination by the rat vibrissal system. , 2007, Journal of neurophysiology.

[25]  Ben Mitchinson,et al.  Feedback control in active sensing: rat exploratory whisking is modulated by environmental contact , 2007, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[26]  Joseph H. Solomon,et al.  Biomechanics: Robotic whiskers used to sense features , 2006, Nature.

[27]  Dario Floreano,et al.  Whisking: An Unexplored Sensory Modality , 2002 .

[28]  H. Bleckmann,et al.  Hydrodynamic Trail-Following in Harbor Seals (Phoca vitulina) , 2001, Science.

[29]  Jeffrey L. Krichmar,et al.  Active Sensing of Visual and Tactile Stimuli by Brain-based Devices , 2004, Int. J. Robotics Autom..

[30]  DaeEun Kim,et al.  Biomimetic whiskers for shape recognition , 2007, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[31]  David Kleinfeld,et al.  Closed-loop neuronal computations: focus on vibrissa somatosensation in rat. , 2003, Cerebral cortex.

[32]  Anthony G. Pipe,et al.  Contact type dependency of texture classification in a whiskered mobile robot , 2009, Auton. Robots.

[33]  T. Prescott,et al.  Active touch sensing in the rat: anticipatory and regulatory control of whisker movements during surface exploration. , 2009, Journal of neurophysiology.

[34]  C. Petersen The Functional Organization of the Barrel Cortex , 2007, Neuron.