Aircraft fuel tank leakage is a very common maintenance problem. A continuum robot is designed for troubleshooting of leaks for fuel tank which has strong constraints and is also explosive. The biomimetic robot with several flexible sections applies actuation redundancy through pulling its four independent driving cables to realize bending motion of two degrees of freedom (DOF). The forward kin...

Bipedal locomotion is a significantly complex yet surprisingly efficient means of movement. Long thought to require a high degree of feedback control, modern research has shown that periodic bipedal gaits are generated by central pattern generators (CPG) (Ijspeert, 2008). While feedback can and often does play a role in determining the parameters of the CPG when an animal moves, basic periodic ...

Doppler-shifts are a rich source of information not exploited by commercial ultrasonic range sensors for robots. Bats use Doppler-shifts for several tasks such as obstacle avoidance and prey capture, hence our motivation for incorporating the use of Doppler to mobile robot navigation. In this work we compare two different cochlear filterbank models (linear and gamma-tone) together with two meth...

We have developed a biomimetic robot based on the American lobster. The robot is designed to achieve the performance advantages of the animal model by adopting biomechanical features and neurobiological control principles. Three types of controllers are described. The first is a state machine based on the connectivity and dynamics of the lobster central pattern generator (CPG). The state machin...

A general problem in robotics is how to best utilize sensors to classify the robot’s environment. The BIOTACT project (BIOmimetic Technology for vibrissal Active Touch) is a collaboration between biologists and engineers that has led to many distinctive robots with artificial whisker sensing capabilities. One problem is to construct classifiers that can recognize a wide range of whisker sensati...

The growing field of human-robot interaction (HRI) demands robots that move fluidly, gracefully, compliantly and safely. This thesis describes recent work in the design and evaluation of long-travel voice coil actuators (VCAs) for use in robots intended for interacting with people. The basic advantages and shortcomings of electromagnetic actuators are discussed and evaluated in the context of h...

The annelid provides a biological solution of effective locomotion adaptable to a large variety of unstructured environmental conditions. The undulated locomotion of the segmented body in the annelid is characterized by the combination of individual motion of the muscles distributed along the body, which has been of keen interest in biomimetic investigation. In this paper, we present an annelid...

This paper presents the design, implementation and simulation of a high-gain, low-power, low-noise CMOS front-end transimpedance amplifier (TIA) for optical interfacing between a biosensor array and analog neural circuits of biohybrid robot controller along with description of Central Pattern Generator (CPG) design used for Cyberplasm based biomimetic robot controller. The proposed TIA uses an ...

The rat has a sophisticated tactile sensory system centred around the facial whiskers. During normal behaviour, rats sweep their longer whiskers (macrovibrissae) through the environment to obtain largescale information, whilst gathering small-scale information with the sensory apparatus around their snout. The macrovibrissae are actively and differentially controlled. Using high-speed video rec...