Abstract
Robots have been used to model nature, while nature in turn can contribute to the real-world artifacts we construct. One particular domain of interest is chemical search where a number of efforts are underway to construct mobile chemical search and localization systems. We report on a project that aims at constructing such a system based on our understanding of the pheromone communication system of the moth. Based on an overview of the peripheral processing of chemical cues by the moth and its role in the organization of behavior we emphasize the multimodal aspects of chemical search, i.e. optomotor anemotactic chemical search. We present a model of this behavior that we test in combination with a novel thin metal oxide sensor and custom build mobile robots. We show that the sensor is able to detect the odor cue, ethanol, under varying flow conditions. Subsequently we show that the standard model of insect chemical search, consisting of a surge and cast phases, provides for robust search and localization performance. The same holds when it is augmented with an optomotor collision avoidance model based on the Lobula Giant Movement Detector (LGMD) neuron of the locust. We compare our results to others who have used the moth as inspiration for the construction of odor robots.
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Pawel Pyk received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering (1991), M.S. in Computer Science (1994) and Ph.D. in Automatic Control and Robotics (1998), all from Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, Poland. With his background in electronics, computer science, control engineering, system dynamics and robotics he was involved in challenging interdisciplinary research projects applied to medicine, biology, and psychology. Since 1992, he conducted his research in biomedical technology at the AO Research Institute (Davos, Switzerland). Currently he is working at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich/Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH, Zurich, Switzerland) on biologically inspired robotics (robotics with particular focus on olfaction, chemosensory UAV and sensor integration), and on the physiological telemetry.
Sergi Bermúdez i Badia is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich/ETH, Zurich, Switzerland since 2003. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Telecommunications Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, in 2003. His research interests include autonomous navigation, computational neuroscience and biologically-based modeling.
Ulysses Bernardet is a PhD student at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich/Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland. He received his M.S. in psychology, 1999, from the University of Zurich. His research interests include neural simulation, autonomous navigation and design of novel robotics platform.
Philipp Knüsel studied physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland. Since 2002, he is a PhD student with Paul Verschure at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at ETHZ. His main research interests are the neuronal coding and processing of sensory information, with special emphasis on the olfactory system of insects.
Mikael A Carlsson got basic biological training at Lund University with focus on sensory biology. He initiated his Ph.D studies in 1999 and mainly worked with neuroimaging in the moth olfactory system. After defending his thesis in 2003 at SLU he continued his work on moth olfactory processing within the AMOTH project. Since 2006 he has a post doc position at AstraZeneca in Södertälje.
Jing Gu is a PhD Student in Engineering Department at the University of Leicester, UK. She received her Bachelors in Computer Science and Technology from Nanjing University, China. Her research interests include biologically inspired robotics, neuronal modeling, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
Eric Chanie is director of Research & development of ALPHA MOS company, specialized in Smart Sensing Systems. He brings 12 years of expertise in Development & Design of multi-sensor array technologies including sample preparation, selection and design of appropriate sensing technologies, software development, data processing techniques and artificial intelligence.
He received an engineer diploma (1993) from ENSEIRB (National Superior school of Electronic and Radiocommunication in Bordeaux, France) as well as an MBA degree (1994).
He was involved in coordination of European Research and Development projects related to artificial olfaction and is a member of the scientific council of European Network of Excellence GOSPEL (General Olfaction and sensing Projects on a European Level). He holds several patents in this field.
Bill S. Hansson is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. He received his BSc and PhD in Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. After graduating he spent a postdoc period at ARLDN, University of Arizona. In 2000 he became Professor in Lund, and in 2001 he was recruited as professor and head of division to the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) at Alnarp, Sweden. In 2006 he was recruited as Director of the Department of Evolutionoary Neuroethology, MPI, Jena. His research centers on the neural mechanisms underlying olfactory-driven behavior in insects, and how these systems have evolved. Systems studied include moth communication, fruit fly olfaction and giant crab olfactory evolution. He has published 125 scientific articles, several in leading scientific journals including Nature, Science, Current Biology and PNAS.
Tim C. Pearce currently holds a Lectureship in Bioengineering at Leicester University where he runs NeuroLab http://www.neurolab.le.ac.uk/ which focuses on research on computational models of olfactory information processing and their application to machine olfaction. He holds a first degree in Electronic Engineering (Honours) awarded by Warwick University and received a PhD. from the same institution in 1997. He has since held the position of Visiting Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Neuroscience, Tufts University Medical School, Boston, USA were he worked on a DARPA supported research programme to translate principles of information processing in the biological olfactory pathway over to practical to instrumentation for chemical sensing. He currently serves as an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Neural Engineering and has been invited to teach at the Advanced European Summer School in Computational Neuroscience, Obidos, Portugal, at the 1st European School of Neuroengineering, Venice, Italy and at the Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop, Telluride, Colorado, USA on numerous occasions. He was recently elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and is a Junior Member of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge.
Paul F.M.J. Verschure (1962) is an ICREA research professor at the Technology Department and Foundation Barcelona Media of University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. He received both his Ma. and PhD in psychology. His scientific aim is to find a unified theory of mind, brain and body through the use of synthetic methods and to apply such a theory to the development of novel cognitive technologies. He has pursued his research at different institutes in the US (Neurosciences Institute and The Salk Institute, both in San Diego) and Europe (University of Amsterdam, University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-ETH—where he was a founding senior member of the Institute of Neuroinformatics – and University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona). He works on biologically constrained models of perception, learning, behavior and cognition that are applied to wheeled and flying robots, interactive spaces and avatars. He has published in leading scientific journals including Nature, Science, PLoS and PNAS. Since 1998, Verschure has generated, together with his collaborators, a series of 17 public exhibits of which the most ambitious was the project “Ada: Intelligent space” for the Swiss national exhibition Expo.02, that was visited by 560000 people.
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Pyk, P., Bermúdez i Badia, S., Bernardet, U. et al. An artificial moth: Chemical source localization using a robot based neuronal model of moth optomotor anemotactic search. Auton Robot 20, 197–213 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-006-7101-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-006-7101-4