The InsectNeuroNano project officially started! The project is a collaboration with Lund University, the University of Copenhagen, and the University of Groningen. The ambition is to transform the anatomy and function of the insect central complex (CX) into a nanophotonic chip for navigation–from skylight input to neuromorphic nanowires and robotics. Evripidis joins as a part-time […]

Firstly the 10m*10m experimental area was divided into a 1m*1m grid using metallic markers.  This allowed the layout of grass tussock and bushes to be mapped onto squared  paper . This mapping provided the 2D position of all vegetation but not their heights. Thus a  database of panoramic images was collected from which the height […]

The app should be in a working state, so now we shall do some very simple edits of the code. To set this up properly, instantiate all 4 example modules as descrbied in the previous tutorial, call the Haferlach PI “HF” when registering it. Tweaking the Combiner (Adjusting Weightings) If you open up the WeightedCombiner […]

Now that you have the projects set up and ready to start development, it is time to examine the code itself. This post will cover ‘wiring up’ an App with the pre-packaged combiners and navigation modules. What is Pre-Packaged? With the AntBot codebase comes with 2 combiners and 4 navigation modules. The ‘Simple Combiner’ ignores […]

This guide expects you to have basic familiarity with Eclipse. Download the project from GitHub https://github.com/InsectRobotics/antbot Download Android Studio, Eclipse & Arduino IDE To begin with, download Android Studio and follow the instructions on the site – on Linux you may need to install extra packages so this is particularly important. To compile the AntBotServer […]

  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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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