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BIOTACT is a four-year research project funded by the Seventh Research Programme (FP7) of the European Union and involves nine research groups in 7 countries. The aim of BIOTACT is to develop novel tactile sensory technologies inspired by the vibrissal (whisker) sensory systems of mammals such as rats and shrews. BIOTACT is one of several projects funded under the FP7 initiative on Bio-ICT Convergence. The BIOTACT project is also sponsoring two web-based projects concerned with promoting research in the field of tactile sensing: the Scholarpedia Encyclopedia of Touch and the Active Touch Community web-site.

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Abstract

Closing your eyes and exploring your surroundings with your fingertips provides an experience that is rich and immediate. While vision supplies information about distant objects, touch is invaluable in sensing the nearby environment. However, in designing intelligent, life-like machines, such as robots, the touch modality has been largely overlooked; current systems make only limited use of tactile sensors for simple tasks such as detecting physical contact. Biology, by contrast, reveals an abundant use of tactile sensing in the animal kingdom. Indeed, in nocturnal creatures, or those that inhabit poorly-lit places, touch is widely preferred to vision as a primary means of discovering the world. The tactile senses of many mammals are built around arrays of facial hairs known as "whiskers" or "vibrissae". In this project we will develop new technologies inspired by the whisker morphology and neural processing systems of two such tactile specialists: the Norwegian rat and the Etruscan shrew.

These animals sweep their whiskers back and forth at high speeds in a controlled and feedback-sensitive manner. This active touch capacity allows them to: (i) maximise their intake of useful information; (ii) solve perceptual tasks such as determining the position, shape, and surface texture of encountered objects; (iii) encode tactile memories that allow recognition of familiar items; and (iv) track and capture prey animals using touch signals alone. Using our understanding of these natural vibrissal systems we will develop two biomimetic artefacts endowed with similar sensing capabilities: a novel active tactile sensing array, termed a BIOTACT sensor, with many hundreds of whisker-like sensing elements; and an autonomous whiskered robot that can seek-out, identify, and track fast-moving target objects. Overall, we hope that our project will bring about a step-change in the understanding of active touch sensing and in the use of whisker-like sensors in intelligent machines.

Uni. Sheffield & Bristol Robotics Lab Berlin Center for Computational Neuroscience International School for Advanced Studies Weizmann Institute & Ben-Gurion University Ecole Polytechnic Federale Federale de Lausanne Brain Vision Systems Northwestern University