Martin J. Pearson

TL;DR: Two versions of a hardware processing architecture for modeling large networks of leaky-integrate-and-flre (LIF) neurons are presented; the second version provides performance enhancing features relative to the first.

TL;DR: 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.

TL;DR: This paper describes the design of a new whiskered robot, Shrewbot, endowed with a biomimetic array of individually controlled whiskers and a neuroethologically inspired whisking pattern generation mechanism, and shows how the morphology of the whisker array shapes the sensory surface surrounding the robot's head, and the impact of active touch control on the sensory information that can be acquired by the robot.

TL;DR: The Whiskerbot project is a collaborative project between robotics engineers, computational neuroscientists and ethologists, aiming to build a biologically inspired robotic implementation of the rodent whisker sensory system using biologically plausible neural networks to mediate adaptive behaviors.

TL;DR: It is shown that accurate classification of surface texture using data obtained from whisking against three different surfaces is achievable and that active vibrissal sensing could likewise be a useful sensory capacity for autonomous robots.