AntBot: A six-legged walking robot able to home like desert ants in outdoor environments

Abstract

Autonomous outdoor navigation requires reliable multisensory fusion strategies. Desert ants travel widely every day, showing unrivaled navigation performance using only a few thousand neurons. In the desert, pheromones are instantly destroyed by the extreme heat. To navigate safely in this hostile environment, desert ants assess their heading from the polarized pattern of skylight and judge the distance traveled based on both a stride-counting method and the optic flow, i.e., the rate at which the ground moves across the eye. This process is called path integration (PI). Although many methods of endowing mobile robots with outdoor localization have been developed recently, most of them are still prone to considerable drift and uncertainty. We 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.

Insect-inspired omnidirectional vision for autonomous localization on-board a hexapod robot

“…The next question will be to understand how these two components of the insects' navigational toolkit merge together. Regarding this work and our prior studies on path integration [1], we believe that AntBot is a reliable robotic replica of desert ants which, besides leading to new parsimonious and accurate navigation systems for robotic applications, can be used as an experimental platform for testing biological models [1].…”

“…In recent years, we have developed an ant-inspired walking robot, called AntBot ( Fig. 1) [1], endowed with parsimonious visual sensors mimicking the compound eye of the desert *This research was supported by the French Direction Générale de l'Armement (DGA), CNRS, Aix Marseille University, the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, and the French National Research Agency for Research (ANR) with the Equipex/Robotex project.…”

“…According to the desert ants navigational toolkit [8], the path integrator (PI) merges polarization cues (orientation) and OF cues (distance) to estimate the localization with respect to the departure point. This strategy has been successfully tested on-board AntBot, resulting in a homing error of 6.7 cm on average, which is lower than one robot's stride (8.2 cm), after a 15m-long journey [1]. In its current version, AntBot is able to navigate autonomously in unknown outdoor environments regardless of the meteorological conditions.…”

A Survey on Swarming With Micro Air Vehicles: Fundamental Challenges and Constraints

“…For example, Pascoal et al (2000) fused gyroscope measurements with the magnetometer in order to filter out disturbances from the magnetometer while also reducing the noise from the gyroscope. Another sensor that has been explored is the celestial compass, which extracts the orientation based on the Sun (Jung et al, 2013;Dupeyroux et al, 2019). Although this sensor is not subject to electro-magnetic disturbances, it is limited to outdoor scenarios and performs best under a clear sky, which may also not always be the case.…”

Resource-efficient bio-inspired visual processing on the hexapod walking robot HECTOR

“…To assess the performance of the embedded processing platform in a realworld scenario the system is used to control visual collision avoidance and navigation behavior on the insect-inspired hexapod walking robot HECTOR ( Fig 1A; [10,11]). Recent work on hexapod robots focusses on different aspects, such as manufactuability [12], different gaits preferable for climbing [13] or bio-inspired visually guided navigation [14]. Due to the mechanical coupling to the ground the application of visually guided navigation on a walking Fig 1.…”