Worm Brain Simulator

Robotics and computer science have contributed an enormous amount to brain research. As computers grow more complex, they are used more and more to simulate the way our brains work. To use a computer to study the brain, scientists have developed models of the brain and how they work with software.

For medical research, worms are a very simple brain model. The tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans has only 302 neurons but exhibits some complex behaviors. When the worm senses food through a variety of sensory neurons, the worm will move forward towards that food source. When the worm’s nose senses a blocking object, the worm will stop, backup and change direction to move around the object or avoid it all together. After successfully simulating the worm’s brain in a more complex environment, the project attempts to build a similar application in a Raspberry Pi robot.

The GoPiGo with a Raspberry Pi was the perfect answer.

The goal of this project was to write a single Python application that could run on a Raspberry Pi and the GoPiGo and be able to traverse its environment, avoiding obstacles, only using a simulated nervous system of the C elgans nematode. This project does not use any programming to stop the GoPiGo robot or make it change direction – only the simulated nervous system guides the robot and creates the behavior that allows the robot to stop and change direction when it encounters an obstacle. This project uses a sonar sensor on the GoPiGo robot to stimulate nose touch sensory neurons and a timing mechanism to activate food sensing neurons to move the robot forward.