Touch but don't look: EU project to advance touch technology
Nine research groups from universities and research institutes inside and outside of the EU are looking to the animal kingdom for inspiration in their development of innovative artificial touch technologies. The BIOTACT ('Biomimetic technology for vibrissal active touch') project will create technologies that can be built into intelligent machines, such as robots. In the future, a whiskered robot rat, for instance, might help in rescue or search missions under conditions of restricted visibility. 'Overall, 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,' project coordinator Professor Tony Prescott of Sheffield University, UK, predicts. 'Today's life-like machines, such as robots, don't make effective use of touch. By learning from nature and developing technologies that do use this physical sense, our researchers will be able to enhance the capabilities of the machines of the future.' 'The use of touch in the design of artificial intelligence systems has been largely overlooked until now,' says Professor Ehud Ahissar of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, whose research team at the institute's neurobiology department is one of the groups participating in the multinational project. Rodent species such as the Norwegian or common rat or the Etruscan shrew are examples of animals that have a highly developed sense of touch, much more efficient than that of the average person's finger tips. The rodents sweep their whiskers back and forth at high speeds in order to determine the shape and surface of objects and capture prey. Professor Ahissar: 'In nocturnal creatures, or those that inhabit poorly-lit places, the use of touch is widely preferred to vision as a primary means of learning and receiving physical information about their surrounding environment.' Why is this technique so much more efficient than using finger tips? Research has shown that it is the active and repetitive sweeping that makes the difference. The consortium's research also suggests that the signals travel from the whiskers through parallel pathways that function within parallel closed feedback loops, constantly monitoring the signals they receive and changing their responses accordingly. The researchers believe that it is the complex interactions between the feedback loops that are responsible for the rich and accurate control of movement, but at the same time, it poses an engineering challenge when trying to build artificial systems based on this concept. 'In order to investigate the role of feedback loops further, consortium members will implement theoretical methods and calculations from theoretical physics and applied mathematics in order to develop and research models that describe the complicated neural processes that control active sensing,' says Professor David Golomb of Ben Gurion University, Israel. 'The aim of this research is to help gain a better understanding of the brain on the one hand, and advance technology on the other,' Professor Ahissar explains. 'That is to say, researchers can use robots as an experimental tool, by building a brain-like system, step-by-step, gaining insights into the workings of the brain's inside components. With regard to technological applications, we suggest that it is the multiple closed feedback loops that are the key features, giving biological systems an advantage over robotic systems. Therefore, implementing this biological knowledge will hopefully allow robotics researchers to build machines that are more efficient, which can be used in rescue missions, as well as search missions under conditions of restricted visibility.' The EU-funded BIOTACT project, which was launched at the beginning of the year, is supported under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), receiving nearly €5.4 million out of the total project cost of around €7.8 million. Ten partners from the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Israel and the USA are contributing to the research.
Countries
Israel, United Kingdom