Abstract
Highly active small mammals need to capture prey rapidly and with a high success rate if they are to survive. We consider the case of the Etruscan shrew, which hunts prey including crickets almost as large as itself, and relies on its whiskers (vibrissae) to complete a kill. We model this hunting behaviour using a whiskered robot. Shrews strike rapidly and accurately after gathering very limited sensory information; we attempt to match this performance by using model-based simultaneous discrimination and localisation of a ‘prey’ robot (i.e. by using strong priors). We report performance that is comparable, given the spatial and temporal scale differences, to shrew performance in most respects.
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Mitchinson, B., Pearson, M.J., Pipe, A.G., Prescott, T.J. (2012). Predictive Prey Pursuit in a Whiskered Robot. In: Herrmann, G., et al. Advances in Autonomous Robotics. TAROS 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7429. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32527-4_31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32527-4_31
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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