Abstract
Echolocating bats rely on active sound emission (echolocation) for mapping novel environments and navigating through them. Many theoretical frameworks have been suggested to explain how they do so, but few attempts have been made to build an actual robot that mimics their abilities. Here, we present the ‘Robat’—a fully autonomous bat-like terrestrial robot that relies on echolocation to move through a novel environment while mapping it solely based on sound. Using the echoes reflected from the environment, the Robat delineates the borders of objects it encounters, and classifies them using an artificial neural-network, thus creating a rich map of its environment. Unlike most previous attempts to apply sonar in robotics, we focus on a biological bat-like approach, which relies on a single emitter and two ears, and we apply a biological plausible signal processing approach to extract information about objects’ position and identity.
Highlights
The growing use of autonomous robots emphasizes the need for new sensory approaches to facilitate tasks such as obstacle avoidance, object recognition and path planning
We present the ‘Robat’—a fully autonomous terrestrial robot that solely relies on bat-like SONAR to orient through a novel environment and map it
Using a biologically plausible system with two receivers and a single emitter(mouth) which produced frequency modulated (FM) chirps at a typical bat rate, the Robat managed to move through a large out-doors novel environment and map it in real-time
Summary
The growing use of autonomous robots emphasizes the need for new sensory approaches to facilitate tasks such as obstacle avoidance, object recognition and path planning. Bat-like robot most challenging tasks, faced by many robots, is the problem of generating a map of an unknown environment, while simultaneously navigating through this environment for the first time [1]. This problem, is routinely solved by echolocating bats that perceive their surroundings acoustically (other animals solve this task on a daily basis using a range of sensory modalities) [2]. By emitting sound signals and analyzing the returning echoes, bats can orient through a new environment and probably map it [3] [4] Inspired by this ability, we present the ‘Robat’—a fully autonomous terrestrial robot that solely relies on bat-like SONAR to orient through a novel environment and map it. Using a biologically plausible system with two receivers (ears) and a single emitter(mouth) which produced frequency modulated (FM) chirps at a typical bat rate, the Robat managed to move through a large out-doors novel environment and map it in real-time
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