Biomimetic robot navigation

Abstract

In the past decade, a large number of robots has been built that explicitly implement biological navigation behaviours. We review these biomimetic approaches using a framework that allows for a common description of biological and technical navigation behaviour. The review shows that biomimetic systems make significant contributions to two fields of research: First, they provide a real world test of models of biological navigation behaviour; second, they make new navigation mechanisms available for technical applications, most notably in the field of indoor robot navigation. While simpler insect navigation behaviours have been implemented quite successfully, the more complicated way-finding capabilities of vertebrates still pose a challenge to current systems.

Path planning versus cue responding: a bio-inspired model of switching between navigation strategies

“…An increasing number of behavioral research studies focus on the capacity of animals to switch between different navigation strategies when it is required by the environmental circumstances (see Franz and Mallot 2000;White 2004;Arleo and Rondi-Reig 2007;Khamassi 2007, for reviews). The majority of these articles explore the interactions between response-and place-based strategies (Packard and McGaugh 1996;Roberts and Pearce 1999;Gibson and Shettleworth 2005;Rich and Shapiro 2009).…”

Robust visual homing with landmark angles

“…Here, we focus on local visual homing methods which are typically used within graph-like topological maps [7,8,9] where connected nodes represent nearby locations in the environment. A local homing algorithm is then used to drive the agent from one node to the next.…”

“…These are 'naturally' occurring landmark points, rather than objects placed in the scene for the sole purpose of being an easily tracked and unmoving landmark. While we focus on local, short-range homing, this can be integrated with a topological map framework [7,8,9,20] to perform long-range homing and localization tasks.…”

Review of Hybridizations of Kalman Filters with Fuzzy and Neural Computing for Mobile Robot Navigation

“…Navigation, defined as the the process of determining and maintaining a course or trajectory to a goal location [8], has been considered the most basic and key problem in mobile robotics since the beginning of the research on that area. Opposite to a "wandering" behavior of the robot, in which it simply "moves around" by just avoiding obstacles in its path, navigation implies a knowledge of the structure of its environment and the ability to self-locate itself in it and in respect to its goal.…”