Toward the convergence: robot and lobster perspectives of tracking odors to their source in the turbulent marine environment

Biomimetic robots are often used as platforms to evaluate specific hypotheses of animal problem solving, or as existence proofs of solutions. A closely allied application of biomimetic systems is the search for constraints on problems for which human experience of the physical world (i.e., through scale mismatch or inadequate sense organs) does not provide a basis for the formulation of well constrained hypotheses. Our investigations of chemo-orientation to turbulent odor sources with Robolobster pursues both of these ends. Parallel tests with Robolobster and with real lobsters under the same conditions allow us to exclude certain chemo-orientation hypotheses, such as concentration-gradient tracking, and to statistically describe potential guidance signals available to lobsters tracking in a turbulent plume. In this paper we analyze the input-output behavior of a lobster and our robot under the same conditions to determine the extent to which the robot´s purely chemotactic algorithm might be incorporated in the lobster. We suggest other chemo-orientation strategies that we believe contribute to the differences between robot and lobster behavior in terms of the alternative strategies available to the American lobster