The University of Sheffield
Department of Psychology

24 July 2007

Grant awarded to develop 'artificial touch' technology

Congratulations to Tony Prescott (Co-ordinator) and Paul Dean, John Porrill, Kevin Gurney and Jim Stone (co-investigators) on winning 4-year FP7 Integrated Project to develop "artificial touch" technologies in partnership with nine research groups from seven countries. Entitled "BIOTACT" (BIOmimetic Technology for vibrissal ACtive Touch ), the total value of the project is 5.4M Euros of which ~1.25M (£850k) will come to Sheffield.

The abstract of the project which is funded by the EU "Information Systems Technologies" theme is as follows:

BIOTACT (BIOmimetic Technology for vibrissal ACtive Touch)



BIOTACT will develop novel biomimetic computational methods and technologies for active touch sensing. The project is inspired by the functionality morphology, and neural processing architectures of biological sensory systems that use tactile hairs known as whiskers or vibrissae. It will focus on two animals that are tactile specialists-the Norwegian rat and the Etruscan shrew. Both species make actively-controlled sweeping movements of their facial whiskers ("whisking") as they explore their environments. Specific objectives are to understand, and then 'reverse-engineer' in the form of computational models, the ability of these animals to:

  2. generate fast rhythmic whisking behaviour, exquisitely modulated by sensory feedback, that allows precise positioning of the vibrissae in a manner that maximises information uptake;
  3. accurately determine object properties such as position, shape and texture, encode tactile memories that can support recognition of familiar items and places, and make rapid and accurate decisions about object identity and spatial location;
  4. determine the parameters of movement, shape, and position of detected prey animals that allow their tracking and capture using tactile sense data alone.

The achievement of these goals will be demonstrated and extended through the development of two biomimetic artefacts:


  2. generate fast rhythmic whisking behaviour, exquisitely modulated by sensory feedback, that allows precise positioning of the vibrissae in a manner that maximises information uptake;
  3. accurately determine object properties such as position, shape and texture, encode tactile memories that can support recognition of familiar items and places, and make rapid and accurate decisions about object identity and spatial location;
  4. determine the parameters of movement, shape, and position of detected prey animals that allow their tracking and capture using tactile sense data alone.

The achievement of these goals will be demonstrated and extended through the development of two biomimetic artefacts:


  2. a novel active tactile sensing array-termed a BIOTACT sensor-with many hundreds of vibrissa-like sensing elements, that can fulfil a wide variety of sensing functions well beyond the capacity of existing tactile sensory devices.
  3. an autonomous whiskered robot with the ability to seek-out, identify, track, and capture fast-moving target objects.

Further objectives are to foster and accelerate research within the wider community of active touch researchers and to train young scientists in the multi-disciplinary skills needed to ensure rapid future progress in this field.

The project partners are:



Tony Prescott, Dept. of Psychology, University of Sheffield, UK (Co-ordinator)
Ehud Ahissar, Weizmann Institute, Israel
Wulfram Gerstner, EPFL, Switzerland
Mathew Diamond, International School of Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy
Tony Pipe/Chris Melhuish, Bristol Robotics Lab, UK
Michael Brecht, Berlin Centre for Computational Neuroscience, Germany
David Golomb, Ben Gurion University, Israel
Patrick Pirim, Brain Vision Systems, Paris, France
Mitra Hartmann, Northwestern University, Chicago, USA