I don't disagree that the Khepera is a useful and capable piece of equipment. I figure that 'calling shenaningans' is appropriate. The article has a throwaway quotation from one of the Meiji researchers which hints at the really interesting part of the whole thing, which seems to be an neural network-type architecture with 'taps' installed in the hidden layers that allow monitoring of their firing patterns. The neural networks themselves seem to be trained to recognize and classify these firing patterns, which allows such a network to distinguish between 'self' and 'other'. The cool part of all of that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Khepera, in this case, and entirely everything to do with some artful use of Matlab's neural network toolbox.