Biomimetic Robots

Robots are proving useful to biology as a means to test our theories about the interaction of the brain, the body and the environment in generating adaptive behavior. Biomimetic robots have been developed that emulate animal nervous systems at different levels of abstraction from hardware analogue neural circuits, described here by Joseph Ayers for models of marine invertebrates, through to algorithms discussed by Frank Grasso for modelling the lobster's ability to follow chemical trails. By developing robots that emulate humans we can also test theories of human action, perception, and cognition, and create medically-useful artefacts such as intelligent prostheses as described in the talk by Maria Carrozza.