Mouse Robot Senses With Whiskers
Tracy Staedter
Discovery News
____________
A mobile robot that uses a set of whiskers to discriminate between different textures could open the door on new sensing technologies that are more sensitive than touch and lead to better mobile devices able to move efficiently though tight, dark places where vision is useless."It's like walking through a dark room and having your hands stretched out so that you won't bump into something ," said neurobiologist Miriam Fend, whose research is part of the AMouse project at the University of Zurich.
Fend's robot is about eight centimeters in diameter and is equipped with two arrays of real rat whiskers that twitch side to side.Each whisker is glued to a membrane covering a microphone. When the whiskers sweep across an object, the membrane deforms, producing a signal that is amplified and then recorded by a computer.
Dec 06, 2005
Tracy Staedter
Discovery News
____________
A mobile robot that uses a set of whiskers to discriminate between different textures could open the door on new sensing technologies that are more sensitive than touch and lead to better mobile devices able to move efficiently though tight, dark places where vision is useless."It's like walking through a dark room and having your hands stretched out so that you won't bump into something ," said neurobiologist Miriam Fend, whose research is part of the AMouse project at the University of Zurich.
Fend's robot is about eight centimeters in diameter and is equipped with two arrays of real rat whiskers that twitch side to side.Each whisker is glued to a membrane covering a microphone. When the whiskers sweep across an object, the membrane deforms, producing a signal that is amplified and then recorded by a computer.
Dec 06, 2005
