AntBot: desert ants inspired autonomous navigation in outdoor environments

J. Dupeyroux et al. 2019 presents a navigation system inspired by desert ants’ navigation behavior, which requires precise and robust sensory modalities.

(Fig from J. Dupeyroux et al. 2019) Fig. The celestial compass. (A) 3D diagram of the pattern of polarization in the sky relative to the AntBot robot observer (O), at a given elevation of the Sun. The gray curves give the AoP all around the dome of the sky. The minimum DoLP occurs in the region of the Sun, and the maximum DoLP occurs 90° from the Sun (red curve). (B) Computer-aided design view of the celestial compass. (C) Photograph of the celestial compass. On the left, the top gear has been removed to show the UV light sensor and the Hall-effect sensor used to stop the sky scanning process after one full gear rotation. (D) An example of normalized raw (thin lines) and filtered (thick lines) signals UV0 (in blue) and UV1 (in red) during a sunny day in April 2017 in Marseille, France. (E) Raw (thin line) and filtered (thick line) log-ratio signals between UV0 and UV1. The AoP is located at the minimum values of the log-ratio output (here, the AoP is 118° and mod is 180°).

They tested several ant-inspired solutions to outdoor homing navigation problems on a legged robot using two optical sensors equipped with just 14 pixels, two of which were dedicated to an insect-inspired compass sensitive to ultraviolet light. When combined with two rotating polarized filters, this compass was equivalent to two costly arrays composed of 374 photosensors, each of which was tuned to a specific polarization angle. The other 12 pixels were dedicated to optic flow measurements. Results show that our ant-inspired methods of navigation give precise performances. The mean homing error recorded during the overall trajectory was as small as 0.67% under lighting conditions similar to those encountered by ants. These findings show that ant-inspired PI strategies can be used to complement classical techniques with a high level of robustness and efficiency.

For further info, please read the paper J. Dupeyroux et al. 2019.

J. Dupeyroux, J. R. Serres et S. Viollet. AntBot: a six-legged walking robot able to home like desert ants in outdoor environments. Science Robotics, 2019 DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aau0307

Further report about AntBot.

Evan Ackerman. Robot Attempts to Navigate As Well As a Tiny Desert Ant. IEEE Spectrum.13 Feb 2019

Donna Lu. Robot mimics desert ants to find its way home without GPS. NewScientist,  13 February 2019

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