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About

Richard Reeve is a robotics and computational neuroscience researcher whose work sits at the compelling intersection of biological systems and autonomous robotics. He is best known for his pioneering contributions to **biologically inspired robotics**, particularly his extensive work modeling cricket phonotaxis — the acoustic orientation behavior female crickets use to locate mates — and implementing these models on physical robot platforms. Reeve's most influential research, garnering over 70 citations, demonstrated that cricket-inspired auditory processing circuits could guide autonomous robots in real outdoor environments, integrating novel "Whegs" locomotion morphology with neural control architectures. Alongside this, his development of increasingly detailed neuroethological neural circuit models (65 citations) advanced understanding of how biological sensorimotor systems achieve robust sound localization. His work on multisensory integration — examining how phonotaxis and optomotor reflexes interact in both crickets and robots — reflects a broader commitment to using robots as scientific tools for testing biological hypotheses, a tradition he explicitly traces to W. Grey Walter. Beyond cricket-inspired systems, Reeve contributed to legged robot locomotion and human-robot spoken dialogue interfaces. With nearly 360 total citations across his key works, his research has meaningfully shaped biorobotics methodology and demonstrated how biomimetic approaches can produce robust, naturalistic robot behavior in complex real-world settings.