Among the various applications of robotics, a contribution that the general public does not often think of and which is very important is to use robots to help us better understand the living. The Psikharpax Project is moving in this direction.
Indeed, finding solutions that allow a robot to properly perceive its environment, to act correctly and to adapt when this environment changes, gives us keys to understand the difficulties faced by animals in their environment, and mechanisms of perception and behavioral adaptation that have been selected during evolution.
The Psikharpax Project contributes to this process. It is to develop an artificial rat-robot whose sensory equipment, the functioning of the computer ” brain ” and the functionalities are inspired as much as possible from the rat. The main objective is to use the robot as a biological hypothesis testing platform to contribute to the understanding of these mechanisms in mammals.
In this folder, you can understand why the rat was chosen as a model, discover the robot-rat and its features, its capabilities, its learning power.