A hierarchy of neuromechanical and robotic models of antenna-based wall following in cockroaches

Abstract

Abstract-It may come as no surprise that a simple "planar unicycle" (or "skate") model can successfully follow a wall at high speed under PD-control. What would be surprising is that such a simple control mechanism may underly the control of one of Nature's fastest terrestrial insects, the American cockroach. For this paper, we implemented the same controller (up to scale) believed to govern cockroach wall following to successfully control two models of the cockroach: a differentialdrive mobile robot with a flexible artificial antenna and a lateral leg spring model with moving center of pressure as the control input. These physical and numerical experiments demonstrate the sufficiency of the cockroach's putative controller in a realworld setting with unmodeled effects, and suggest how the nervous system might guide leg placement in response to sensory stimuli. This hierarchy of models may prove useful in generating prescriptive hypotheses for biological testing and hence elucidating the general principles that underly sensorguided animal locomotion.

Resistive flex sensors: a survey

“…The so called 'Garcia Robot' utilized the same controller that governs the following of a wall by a cockroach, by means of an antenna that provides tactile feedback, integrated along its length with a series of RFSs that measure the local curvatures of the antenna [231]. Such a simple mechanism successfully allowed a wheeled robot to follow a wall at a speed as high as the one of Nature's fastest terrestrial insects.…”