Artificial intelligence

Citation

Rudall, B.H. (1998), "Artificial intelligence", Kybernetes, Vol. 27 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.1998.06727haa.002

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

AI and biology

The Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, has developed projects that involve both artificial intelligence and biology. One such project has resulted in the development of a cricket robot based on a model of the sensorimotor of a cricket, which is the grasshopper-like insect, the males of which produce a characteristic chirping sound. The robot moves like a female cricket responding to a male calling song. The project, it is claimed, has already provided important insights for AI and biology researchers into sensorimotor behaviour.

Dr Barbara Webb (currently at the Nottingham University's Department of Psychology in the UK) whose doctoral thesis inspired the project says that:

Doing statistically-validated real biological experiments with robots in this way enables robot designers to learn from animal behaviour as well as assisting investigations into animal behaviour.

Edinburgh's projects leader, Dr John Hallam, emphasises the value of this approach in robotics; he believes that:

Animals have been engineered by evolution to survive in their ecological niche. Understanding their niche-specific behaviour greatly helps robot designers when making crucial decisions about the best mechanism for a task, such as responding intelligently to events in a particular environment.

Dr Webb focused on the process used by female crickets to identify and locate singing males because it involves complex and subtle behaviour patterns, using apparently simple basic mechanisms. The female can distinguish a song from all other sounds and target a particular male, even when other suitors are chirping almost identical songs.

A report from the Edinburgh AI Department says that:

The "ears" of the cricket robot consist of small microphones and circuits designed to mimic a cricket's actual sound processing system. Robot "ears" are constructed as an attachment to the commercially available Khepera robot. The attachment cricket hearing system is sold by the Edinburgh AI Department.

In experiments, the robot consistently headed towards speakers playing artificial and real cricket songs, following a similar zigzag path to that observed in live crickets. A study was also made of the relationship between movement in response to a sound (known as "phonotaxis") and the song's structure, which consists of 20 millisecond "chirps" of about three "syllables" interspersed by silence. Phonotaxis performance was found to depend on this structure and the song's frequency.

A model of the cricket's neural processing system was developed to represent actual impulses, or "spikes", generated by neurons in response to song syllables. This controlled the robot's movement to make it reproduce the cricket's known preference for syllables that are not too fast or too slow.

The development of this project is part of an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) initiative. Further work in this area is continuing and a variety of uses of the project's methodology to assist robot design and biological research are being pursued by Drs Webb and Hallam. Currently, for example, they are considering the integration of a number of cricket sensorimotor behaviours into a robot that could have potential agricultural applications.

Pictures of the cricket on the Khepera-based robot developed by Drs Hallam and Webb with the help of research assistant Henrik Lund (now at the University of Aarhus), together with a prototype cricket robot made of Lego are published in the EPSRC's Research File (Impact, No. 19, 1998). The Web links for this project are:www.dai.ed.ac.uk/groups/mrg/MRG.html (Edinburgh Department of AI) andwww.psyc.nott.ac.uk/aigr/people/bhw.html (Nottingham University).