The small mouse-inspired robot designed and produced at the Polo Sant'Anna Valdera di Pontedera (the research park belonging to Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna di Pisa) was given the Best Paper Award at Robio 2007 - an international robotics conference which recently took place in Sanya, China.
The work was the winner among over 400 entries.
It is a small four-legged robot in the shape of a mouse that is able to reproduce certain motions including pushing levers and the like.
The creators were researchers and docents of the Arts and Crim laboratory of the Polo Sant'Anna Valdera di Pontedera and their colleagues from the Waseda University of Tokyo.
The robot was later used in Japanese labs to study the animal's behaviour, with particular attention to social interaction and learning models in mice.
