“Arduino UNO-compatible robotic simulation of the C. elegans nematode
Longer duration video of nose touch behavior, comparison with biological worm. DescriptionNematoduino is an Arduino UNO-compatible robotic simulation of the C. elegans nematode.At the core of the simulation is a spiking neural network incorporating 300 neuron cells of thebiological worm’s connectome, along with associated muscle cells. This implementation is based onprior work [1], but with the following improvements:A compressed representation of the connectome network (8 kilobytes)Ability to run on the extremely flexible Arduino UNO platformA biologically motivated conntectome-motor interfaceIn its current form the nematoduino software consumes 13542 bytes (42%) of the program memoryof an UNO-compatible board, and 825 bytes (40%) of the SRAM, leaving plenty of room for experimentationand further development. It’s my hope that nematoduino will end up in the hands of a lot of studentsand neurorobotics hobbyists!LocomotionAs in Ref. 1, either the chemotaxis (“smell finding”) or nose touch neurons are stimulated depending on whetherthe ultrasonic sensor has been triggered. A flow chart representing how sensor state feeds through the connectomesimulation and out through the motors is given in Figure 1. Particular weight is given to the neck muscles of theworm, as they provide the direction of locomotion (see Ref. 3)”