The Shrewbot is the latest in a series of robots which use ‘active touch’ rather than vision to navigate their environment. It was developed at Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) in collaboration with the Univ. of Sheffield Active Touch Laboratory as part of the BIOTACT project, Professor Tony Pipe (UWE Bristol) and Professor Tony Prescott (Univ. of Sheffield) are working on the Shrewbot project with a number of partners. BRL is a collaboration between UWE Bristol and the Univ. of Bristol.
The shrew sweeps its whiskers back and forth at high speeds and through picking up vibrations it gathers information from the environment such as the location, shape and texture of objects. It then stores this information in its memory.