Phonotaxis in crickets and robotsright

Description

Phonotaxis is the ability to approach sound sources. Female crickets can locate males by phonotaxis to the song they produce. The behaviour and underlying physiology have been studied in some depth - a useful summary (now missing link!) has been created by Tom Oliver at Cornell.

Our project is concerned with building a robot model of this behaviour. It uses a specially designed electronic circuit to model the cricket ears and a simulated spiking neuron network to process the signal, and is mounted on a robot to be tested in various experiments.

Current investigations are concerned with integrating additional sensorimotor systems with this behaviour, to make a walking robot that can perform taxis outdoors.

People associated with the project:

Current

Barbara Webb - Started the cricket robot project and is principal investigator
Richard Reeve -  RA on the current project, to build more accurate neural models
Berthold Hedwig -  (Cambridge) Behavioural and physiological experiments on cricket phonotaxis
James Poulet -  (Cambridge) Behavioural and physiological experiments on cricket phonotaxis
Robert  Mcgregor - Technician on the current project
Andrew Horchler - designed and built the Whegs robot we have used as a recent platform
Darren Smith - postgraduate looking at learning and mushroom bodies
Benjamin Torben-Nielsen - student project (four ears vs. two)

Previous associates:

Tim Smithers - supervised Barbara Webb's postgraduate work
John Hallam  - Co-investigator, involved particularly in the design of the electronic ears
Henrik Lund - RA on the previous project (Khepera implementation)
Tom Scutt - collaborator (spiking neuron model)
Rens Kortman - student project (divergent evolution of song processes)
Mark Drake - student project (custom interface) and used the robot in his MSc project
Priscilla Doresteijn - student project (evolutionary optimisation of neural circuit)
Tanya Zaad- student project (neural circuit for song production)
Reid Harrison - designed the aVLSI optomotor chip we are using to integrate with phonotaxis
Tim Sharpe - Postgraduate looking at evolution and choice behaviour in cricket and robot experiments
Tim Chapman - Postgraduate looking at cricket escape behaviours

Selected Publications

Webb, B. (1995). Using robots to model animals: a cricket test . Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 16, 117-134.

Webb, B. (1996). A robot cricket. Scientific American, 275(6), 94-99.

Webb, B., & Hallam, J. (1996). How to attract females: further Robotic Experiments in Cricket Phonotaxis. From Animals to Animats 4: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behaviour (pp. 75-83). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lund, H. H., Webb, B., & Hallam, J. (1998). Physical and temporal scaling considerations in a robot model of cricket calling song preference. Artificial Life, 4(1), 95-107.

Webb, B. (1998). Robots crickets and ants: models of neural control of chemotaxis and phonotaxis. Neural Networks: 11, 1479-1496.

Webb, B., & Hallam, J. Experimental and statistical evluation of a robot model of cricket phonotaxis. Adaptive Behaviour (accepted  January 1998/withdrawn due to the publication delay in May 2000).

Webb, B., & Scutt, T. (2000) A simple latency dependent spiking neuron model of cricket phonotaxis. Biological Cybernetics 82, 247-269

Webb, B. & Harrison, R. (2000) Integrating sensorimotor systems in a robot model of cricket behaviour, Sensor Fusion And Decentralized Control In Robotic Systems III November 5-8, Boston. (Editors: McKEE GT, Schenker PS) Proceedings of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE), 4196, 113-124, 2000 (pdf file)

Webb, B (2000) What does robotics offer animal behaviour? Animal Behaviour, 60, 545-558 (pdf file)

Webb, B. (2001) Can robots make good models of biological behaviour? Target article for Behavioural and Brain Sciences 24 (6) (html pre-print)

Webb, B. (2002) Robots in invertebrate neuroscience Nature 417:359-363 (pdf preprint)

Reeve, R. & Webb, B. (2002) New neural networks for robot phonotaxis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 361:2245-2266 (pdf preprint)

Horchler, A., Reeve, R., Webb, B. & Quinn, R. (2003) Robot phonotaxis in the wild: A biologically inspired approach to outdoor sound localization. Proceedings of ICAR (pdf preprint)

Webb, B. & Reeve, R. (2003) Reafferent or redundant: How should a robot cricket use an optomotor reflex? Adaptive Behaviour 11:137-158 (pdf preprint)

Webb, B., Reeve, R., Horchler & Quinn, R.(2003) Testing a model of cricket phonotaxis on an outdoor robot platform. Proceedings of TIMR03 (pdf preprint)

Webb, B. (2004) Neural mechanisms for prediction: do insects have forward models? Trends in Neurosciences 27:278-282 (pdf preprint)

Related

Biorobotics
The methodology developed in this research has been dubbed 'biorobotics': the intersection of robotics and biology. Our particular emphasis is the use of the robot as a model to understand biological systems. Other research in this area is linked from the Biorobotics page, and a review of research in this area can be found in Webb (2000 & 2001) above
Cricket escape behaviour
Has also been investigated in our lab, here's the link