Using a biomimetic sonar bat robot to explore the sensory world of bats in the field and in the laboratory

Abstract

Bat species such as those belonging to the families of horseshoe and Old World leaf-nosed bats make their navigation decisions based on echoes that are often received from dense vegetation. To gain an understanding of how these animals accomplish navigation based on such complicated clutter echoes, a biomimetic sonar system that replicates the auditory periphery of bats has been used as synthetic observer to probe the sensory stimulus ensemble of the bats in a flight tunnel as well as in the field. Both laboratory and field experiments were carried out in Brunei on the island of Borneo. For the flight tunnel, the biomimetic sonar robot has been used to record a large number of pulse and echo pairs in conjunction with an array consisting of 28 ultrasonic microphones. In this experiment, the sonar head was positioned at points spaced on a 3d grid that covers the tunnel's volume. This data set will be used to train a deep neural network to predict the inputs to the ears of a bat maneuvering in the tunnel. In the field experiments, the sonar head was carried off road in various tropical-forest habitats to record echo samples in conjunction with precise GPS location references.