Abstract
Diverse taxa use Earth’s magnetic field in conjunction with other sensor modes to accomplish navigation tasks that range from local homing to long-distance migration across continents and ocean basins. However, despite extensive research, animal magnetoreception remains a poorly understood, and active research area. Concurrently, Earth’s magnetic field offers a signal that engineered systems can leverage for navigation and localization in environments where man-made systems such as GPS are either unavailable or unreliable. Using a proxy for Earth’s magnetic field, and inspired by migratory animal behavior, this work implements behavioral strategies to navigate through a series of magnetic waypoints. The strategies are able to navigate through a closed set of points, in some cases running through several “laps”. Successful trials were observed in both a range of environmental parameters, and varying levels of sensor noise. The study explores several of these parameter combinations in simulation, and presents preliminary results from a version of the strategy implemented on a mobile robot platform. Alongside success, limitations of the simulated and hardware algorithms are discussed. The results illustrate the feasibility of either an animal, or engineered platform to use a set of waypoints based on the magnetic field to navigate. Additionally, the work presents an engineering/quantitative biology approach that can garner insight into animal behavior while simultaneously illuminating paths of development for engineered algorithms and systems.
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