New Ears for a Robot Cricket

Cricket females perform phonotaxis towards the specific sounds produced by male crickets. By means of a well-tuned peripheral auditory system the cricket is able to extract directional information about the sound, and the neural system can recognize the species specific characteristics of the song. Crickets use sounds coming from at least four body openings to derive the directional signal. A new artificial four-input apparatus which implements a detailed model of the cricket’s peripheral auditory system, together with our most recent model of the neural system are used for this study. A series of experiments is conducted to validate the new auditory input device and to benchmark the neural model. This study shows that (i) the new auditory input device provides the robot with realistic inputs, and, (ii) most behavioral features ascribed to previous neural models still hold for the new neural model. The relevant differences are discussed.