Predictive prey pursuit in a whiskered robot

Mitchinson, Ben; Pearson, Martin; Pipe, Anthony G.; Prescott, Tony J.

Abstract

Highly active small mammals need to capture prey rapidly and with a high success rate if they are to survive. We consider the case of the Etruscan shrew, which hunts prey including crickets almost as large as itself, and relies on its whiskers (vibrissae) to complete a kill. We model this hunting behaviour using a whiskered robot. Shrews strike rapidly and accurately after gathering very limited sensory information; we attempt to match this performance by using model-based simultaneous discrimination and localisation of a ‘prey’ robot (i.e. by using strong priors). We report performance that is comparable, given the spatial and temporal scale differences, to shrew performance in most respects.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: FIRA-TAROS congress
• Start Date: Aug 20, 2012
• End Date: Aug 23, 2012
• Publication Date: Aug 1, 2012
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 24, 2019
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: whiskered robot, predictive prey pursuit
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1435743
• Additional Information: Title of Conference or Conference Proceedings : Proceedings of 13th Advances in Autonomous Systems