Once the chassis has been wired up the wheels may need to be calibrated. Each wheel is equipped with a ‘wheel encoder’ that measures the wheel’s rotations. The next section will provide some background as to what a wheel encoder is and how they work. If you are already familiar with wheel encoders then simply […]

  Above we can see AntBot ‘in the flesh. Ignoring the lego framework that supports the camera, to assemble your own AntBot you need the following*:   *You will also need some standard issue male-female copper wires to connect the boards as well as a Serial-USB cable to connect the Arduino to the smartphone. The […]

Benjamin Risse has just joined the group on May the 1st to work on ant navigation.

Follow up to RoboAnt: Build your own Android robot It’s vital we can control our soon-to-be autonomous robot! Fortunately, that’s really easy with the code provided on https://github.com/d3kod/roboant . Here’s how…

Nowadays smartphones are affordable, compact and capable computers. Mike had the ingenious idea that they can do a perfect robot brain. Packed with computing power and useful sensors,  the one thing they can’t do (I think) is control external analog components – like motors. This is where the Arduino comes in. The hugely popular embedded platform […]

  Our lab has been on the BBC news : Watch Robot builders inspired by animal kingdom

The essence of our methodology is to use robots as models of biological systems.  We usually refer to this as “Biorobotics” (although the terminology in this field is not fixed). An important feature is that our principal focus is on understanding the biology, using robotics as a tool, rather than on trying to improve robotics […]

Under Construction

Female crickets are able to locate mates by walking or flying towards the songs produced by males. We are modelling the neural circuits underlying this behaviour and testing the models on robots (including an outdoor robot).

Adult fruit-flies can learn to avoid odours that are paired with shock, and larval fruit-flies will learn to avoid or approach odours that are paired with attractive or unattractive food. We are modelling the brain circuits underlying these changes in behaviour.