#2 Barbara Webb: Insect Robotics

Barbara is a professor of Biorobotics at Edinburgh. We start with a quick philosophical exploration of robots using chairs, James Gibson's concept 'affordances', and whether insects have meaning. Next, we talk about how robots can be used to test hypotheses in biology. For most of the episode, we discuss the incredible things crickets, ants and the mushroom body can do. We explore some interesting questions such as: How does embodiment in crickets replace the need for neural processing? How do ants integrate different sensory modalities? Do insects have consciousness? And can we find associative general-purpose brain regions in the insect brain? We also discuss how her robotics work can inform predictive coding and reinforcement learning. As usual, we finish off with a career question and her future projects.

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Intro

(02:43) - Philosophy questions

(08:11) - Robot models to test biological hypotheses

(17:45) - Cricket bodies, cricket robots, and cricket music

(26:58) - Ants, spatial navigation, visual memory

(30:14) - Insect learning, sparse coding, insect consciousness

(39:25) - Lessons for embodied AI, predictive coding

(43:57) - Reinforcement learning paper

(50:58) - Career advice

(56:57) - Upcoming project GRASP, postdoc positions

Barbara's website

Talks and papers by Barbara :

Talk on ants, other insects:

Talk on n crickets

7 dimensions for robot models paper

Reinforcement Learning paper

Multimodal sensory integration in insects paper

Postdoc at Edinburgh

Insect AI

InsectNeuroNano

My Twitter