A robot inspired by the Etruscan shrew called Shrewbot

As featured on BBC 1 - The One Show, 20 January 2012

The Etruscan shrew is nocturnal, relying on its whiskers to find, track and capture its prey - often the same size as itself. The efficiency of this tiny creature has inspired scientists to look at ways of replicating the shrew's whiskers to enable robots to find their way around without the use of vision.

The Shrewbot has been developed at Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) in collaboration with the University of Sheffield Active Touch Laboratory as part of the BIOTACT project, Professor Tony Pipe (UWE Bristol) and Professor Tony Prescott (University of Sheffield) are working on the Shrewbot project with a number of partners.

• Category

  Education

[Sheila Grimes]

SO INTERESTING!

[Jorge Gamaliel Frade Chávez]

This amazing, with this robot you can make many things Shrew rhythm. Ritmo musaraña.

[Takashi Ogura]

reaction is very quick. nice!

[ereignisfelder]

look how the bot is doing experiments on the human in the background. while a nother human was programmed to talk to the camera.

[MinotawrTV]

This is awesome, better than R2D2 even, though only by a whisker.