Robots: Modeling Biology

Robots: Modeling Biology: "

The latest episode of the Robots
podcast focusses on using robots to model biology. The first guest
is Barbara Webb, who is
director of the Insect
Robotics Group at the University of Edinburgh and has
published several seminal papers on the subject (her 2008 paper on 'Using robots to understand animal behavior' is a
good place to start). Following an earlier interview on her
work, Webb now addresses more complex questions: What is the
importance of distributed control and embodiment in biological
systems? and How do we find equally powerful solutions for
robots? This episode's second guest is Steffen
Wischmann, who is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the EPFL and at the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
Wischmann has a long-standing, deep interest in robotic models and his
work has covered both embodied and cognitive aspects of robot models. He
outlines the value of robotic models for biology, describes their
strengths and limitations, and explains their increasingly important
role in research fields that cannot rely on a fossil record to
understand the evolution of traits, such as animal communication. Read
on or directly tune
in!

�I N ' S B X"

Robots: Modeling Biology: "Barbara Webb from the University of Edinburgh discusses insect inspired robotics as a control system design approach. Steffen Wischman from the EPFL/UNIL then gives his view on when robots should be used to model biology and his interest in using artificial evolution."