Cyber rodent seems to be a classical research project that use robots to study goal-directed behaviors.

Based on the theories of reinforcement learning and evolutionary computation, we exlore parallel learning mechanisms using a colony of small rodent-like mobile robots called Cyber Rodents. Cyber Rodent Hardware

The Cyber Rodent robot has an omnidirectional vision system as its eye, infra-red proximity sensors as its whiskers, two wheels for locomotion, and a three-color LED for emotional communication. Especially it has the capabilities of recharging from external battery packs and exchanging gene (program or data) via IR-ports.

Why do I blog this? just like the robot looking + the underlying idea of the project (learning mechanisms). Besides, it's interesting to see that the "rodent" metaphor is still in use even with robot counterparts...