Homing instincts of ants help guide robot dirigible

Citation

(2001), "Homing instincts of ants help guide robot dirigible", Industrial Robot, Vol. 28 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2001.04928daf.004

Homing instincts of ants help guide robot dirigible

Homing instincts of ants help guide robot dirigible

Keywords: Robots, Navigation

Desert ants manage to find their way home when they don't know the exact location by processing visual cues from the surrounding terrain. Now the same homing instinct has been incorporated into a new navigation technology by a research team at the Science University of Tokyo. With charge-coupled device (CDD) cameras for eyes, the navigation system can help a small dirigible fly back and reach its objective by merely processing image information even when there is one directional cue in the area. This type of system could find use in a wide variety of monitoring applications, such as inspecting towers, bridges, and nuclear power plants.

Desert ants walk in a zigzag pattern in seeking food, and even when an ant has traveled 500 metres from the nest it can still determine the shortest route back home. It tums out that the ant uses two different homing mechanisms, one to get back to the nest from far away, one to get back to the nest once it has reached the vicinity.

This new navigation technology mimics this latter mechanism used by the ant to get home from nearby. The system works by continually monitoring the direction, height, and width of three objects that serve as markers, using the data on the relative position of these markers to determine its own location and the direction of the landing site. The prototype robot dirigible – 1.1 metres in diameter, 1.9m long – uses a set of six propellers to move forward and backward, up, down, and sideways. The CCD camera captures image information for navigational processing. In tests from 20 metres away, the robot dirigible was successful almost 100 percent of the time in finding its way to the landing site.