Robot Bat With Echolocation

productdose.com writes "A robotic bat head that can emit and detect ultrasound in the band of frequencies used by the world's bats will give echolocation research a huge boost. Sonar in water is a mature field, but sonar in air is far less advanced. Whenever a robot team wants to build an autonomous robot they look at sonar first, but they quickly run into problems due to the simple nature of commercial sonar systems, and switch to vision or laser-ranging. The IST project CIRCE hopes that the research they can now do with the robotic bat will lead to more sophisticated sonar systems being used for robot navigation and other applications."

Make it right!

[PaulBu]

For all the old Pink Floyd fans -- it's "ANYBODY", not "ANYONE"! ;-)

Paul B.

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Re:I wonder..

[Eightyford]

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong; but I believe that moths actually have a natural "radar detector" for sensing their predator's (bats) pings.

Heh, is pings still the correct word when it's for sonar?

Re:Ultrasound band saturation?

[rolfmueller]

First of all, it is still not fully clear if bats take special actions to avoid "jamming" each other. Ultrasound doesn't carry far (due to absorption) and ultrasonic emissions by bats (and the CIRCE head) are pretty directional, i.e., sound goes mostly into one direction. So the space that is "jammed" by a bat (or a robot) is really small. In the temporal domain, there are a lot of pauses, too. So one sonar system (bat or robot) really influences only a small volume for short time intervals, which should not hamper others all that much.

Related topic / use of sonar

[The Master Control P]

I remember reading a few years ago about a new sonar-like system being tested by the military to locate snipers. A soldier would carry a microphone, recording the sounds as he went. When a gun was test fired, the information was fed into a computer which computationally tracked the motion of the sound waves through a test course back to the point of origin.

It's a very promising system (Someone shoots at you, your eyepiece HUD immediately tells you where he is), but it was totally impractical. IIRC, they needed to have a prebuilt 3-d model of the test range for the program to backtrace the bullet. It also took the simulation hours to backtrace one bullet when run on a supercomputer. The computing power will soon be no problem. The hard part will be to generate a sufficiently accurate 3-d model of downtown Baghdad...

It sounds as if some of the things they are researching here (preprocessing input/output) might have some application. Don't know what became of that sound-backtrace project, though.

Re:sonar in air...

[adrianmonk]

Call me crazy... but isn't "Sonar in Air" called "radar"?

Not exactly. Sonar ("SOund Navigation And Ranging") uses sound but radar ("RAdio Detection And Ranging") uses radio.

Re:wrong direction?

[mbrx]

It does not sound like you have had very much hands on experience with sonars within robotics. The current state of commercially available sonars (in the air) provides a single range measurement for a cone (usually ca. 30 degrees, but sometimes much smaller). This range measurement is *very* unreliable since it only gives the distance to one point (usually the closest) within this cone and only under the rights circumstances (depending on the material, the angle towards sonar etc.). The biggest problem with these sensors is the low angular resolution and unreliability. Nonetheless the state of the art in, for instance, map building manages to construct some surprisingly accurate maps, to navigate in indoor environments etc. To say that the data isn't _used_ well enough is not an accurate description of the problem. The problem rather lies in the sensors and in the signal processing (computing eg. range data). Oh, and also: if you are interested in robotics make sure to take a look at Player/Stage http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] which is an opensource implementation of drivers for various commercial robots as well as some controll functionalities, simulators etc.

Credit where it's due...

[Any Web Loco]

http://bash.org/?240849 [bash.org]