Another Ratbot, This One with Bigger Whiskers
Encountering a swarm of genuine sewer-dwelling rats would send the average human screaming and jumping up onto the nearest chair, but there's nothing to fear -- and everything to admire -- about the latest plague of ratbots being developed in robotics labs around the world. First came Psikharpax, the French ratbot with the fancy literary name, whose sensors simulated the function of three senses: vision, hearing, and touch. Now comes the less jazzily named SCRATCHbot (Spatial Cognition and Representation through Active TouCh) from England, who focuses only on the sense of touch. In nocturnal creatures like rats, touch trumps vision as a primary means of exploring the world. Hence, whiskers are the key to this new ratbot. Professor Tony Prescott, from the University of Sheffield's Department of Psychology teamed up with the Bristol Robotics Lab to design a blind-but-be-whiskered ratbot that sweeps its environment with...