A hierarchy of neuromechanical and robotic models of antenna-based wall following in cockroaches

Abstract

It may come as no surprise that a simple "planar unicycle" (or "skate") model can successfully follow a wall at high speed under PD-control. What would be surprising is that such a simple control mechanism may underly the control of one of nature's fastest terrestrial insects, the American cockroach. For this paper, we implemented the same controller (up to scale) believed to govern cockroach wall following to successfully control two models of the cockroach: a differential-drive mobile robot with a flexible artificial antenna and a lateral leg spring model with moving center of pressure as the control input. These physical and numerical experiments demonstrate the sufficiency of the cockroach's putative controller in a real-world setting with unmodeled effects, and suggest how the nervous system might guide leg placement in response to sensory stimuli. This hierarchy of models may prove useful in generating prescriptive hypotheses for biological testing and hence elucidating the general principles that underly sensor-guided animal locomotion.