  Leeches are fascinating creatures: they have simple modular nervous circuitry
m yet exhibit a rich spectrum of behavioural modes. Leeches could be ideal
blue-prints for designing flexible soft robots which are modular,
multi-functional, fault-tolerant, easy to control, capable for navigating using
optical, mechanical and chemical sensorial inputs, have autonomous
inter-segmental coordination and adaptive decision-making. With future designs
of leech-robots in mind we study how leeches behave in geometrically
constrained spaces. Core results of the paper deal with leeches exploring a row
of rooms arranged along a narrow corridor. In laboratory experiments we find
that rooms closer to ends of the corridor are explored by leeches more often
than rooms in the middle of the corridor. Also, in series of scoping
experiments, we evaluate leeches capabilities to navigating in mazes towards
sources of vibration and chemo-attraction. We believe our results lay
foundation for future developments of robots mimicking behaviour of leeches.
