Welcome to the scorpion lab at the University of Oklahoma. Our research is focused on understanding the sensory processing, behavior, and navigation of scorpions. We use both behavioral and electrophysiological studies to characterize the sensory capabilities of scorpions with the aim of understanding their behavior in nature. We house numerous scorpions in our animal sanctuary and routinely collect new specimens for further studies.

We are also interested in the navigational strategies of insects, specifically, the navigation by scene familiarity hypothesis. Through computational simulation studies, we have shown that a simple vision-based algorithm inspired by bee and ant behavior can successfully recapitulate complex learned routes. We are working on implementing this algorithm in robots.