Ants and other insects are capable of traveling long distances and always finding their way home. Inspired by their biology, a group of researchers has created tiny autonomous drones capable of navigating indoor routes of up to 100 meters.
Researchers at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlandspresented their new method in an article published Science Robotics.
The study explains how researchers built on biological discoveries about how Ants visually recognize their surroundings and combine this with counting their steps to return safely home..
The team led by Tom van Dijk adapted existing methods to create a Bio-inspired strategy that combines odometry – measurement of the distance traveled in a specific direction – and visual localizationwhich guides orientation in relation to visual reference points in the environment.
The researchers implemented their method in a 56 gram Crazyflie Brushless drone equipped with a panoramic camera, a microcontroller and 192 kB of memory, and tested it in various indoor scenarios.
The robot first flew to a destination, taking snapshots of its surroundings at regular intervals along the way. On the way back, it used visual localization to return along the same route, periodically comparing its current surroundings with snapshots of waypoints to correct course if it went off course.
The strategy allows these robots to return home after long journeys and requires very few computing and memory resources, since the snapshots were compressed as much as possible and spaced out as much as possible without losing precision.
The main idea behind this method is that you can space out snapshots much further if the robot travels between snapshots based on odometry, said Guido de Croon, one of the co-authors of the paper.
Tiny robots, from tens to a few hundred grams, and With the ability to navigate on their own, they have the potential for interesting applications.because thanks to their low weight, they are extremely safe, even if they accidentally collide with someone.
Because they are small, they can move through narrow areas and if they are manufactured at a low cost, They can be deployed in large numbers to quickly cover a large areafor example in greenhouses for the early detection of pests or diseases.
To navigate their environment, most robots rely on external resources, such as GPS, or computationally complex algorithms. However, these options can be expensive and unreliable.
Besides, Map-based algorithms can be computationally complex. and consume a lot of memory, which poses a challenge for autonomous navigation of small robots with limited resources.