There are numerous examples in nature where ‘active touch’ plays a primary role in how an animal finds its way around and how it behaves. Inspired by the Etruscan shrew, one of the world’s tiniest mammals, researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) developed Shrewbot – the newest generation of a robots that use sophisticated… »

A combined team of researchers from the Oxford University and University of Sheffield used a novel method to analyze the energy used in the formation of fibers in natural silk and synthetic materials in order to demonstrate that natural unspun silks taken from a silkworm are a thousand times more efficient than common plastics when… »

After their work on Whiskerbot, a group of researchers from the University of Sheffield and the Bristol Robotics Lab has created the SCRATCHBot (Spatial Cognition and Representation through Active TouCh), which uses its plastic whiskers in a sweeping back and forth motion to find its way round, much like a real rat. Many rodents have… »