Biomimetic tactile target acquisition, tracking and capture

•We modelled shrew hunting behaviour in a mobile robot with tactile whiskers.•We trial identification, localisation, and “capture” of a moving prey robot.•Sparse data are combined with strong priors to drive behaviour, as in the shrew.•We demonstrate comparable performance (given scale differences) to the animal.•Results represent a first complete and independent whisker-driven animal model.

Good performance in unstructured/uncertain environments is an ongoing problem in robotics; in biology, it is an everyday observation. Here, we model a particular biological system—hunting in the Etruscan shrew—as a case study in biomimetic robot design. These shrews strike rapidly and accurately after gathering very limited sensory information from their whiskers; we attempt to mimic this performance by using model-based simultaneous discrimination and localisation of a ‘prey’ robot (i.e. by using strong priors to make sense of limited sensory data), building on our existing low-level models of attention and appetitive behaviour in small mammals. We report performance that is comparable, given the spatial and temporal scale differences, to shrew performance, and discuss what this study reveals about biomimetic robot design in general.