Eyes and ears: combining sensory motor systems modelled on insect physiology

Abstract

Integrating sensorimotor systems is still a difficult problem for robotics. Biological inspiration, which has been effectively used to address single sensorimotor tasks, could also be applied to this problem. Several studies on the cricket suggest that it integrates an optomotor response to improve its sound localization behaviour. We have taken two existing 'biorobots'-one that uses an a VLSI circuit to reproduce the optomotor behaviour and another that models in hardware and software the sound localization of the cricket-and combined their capabilities to investigate whether an additive combination will reproduce these effects. We report the initial results and discuss a number of issues raised by this investigation.