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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."
It collects information about its surroundings, evaluates it, and then discards the data in favour of running into un-seen objects.
I saw this one on Loony Tunes...the robot bat is dressed up as an attractive female bat, and lures the lovestruck male bat offscreen, where it then explodes, charring the male bat most humourously.
At least that's the way I remember it. Stupid closed-head injury...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I swear, I haven't heard that word since elementary school... After hearing about if for a few years, no one gives a damn about how bats get around.
Is is is...there there there...anyone anyone anyone...in in in....there there there?
For all the old Pink Floyd fans -- it's "ANYBODY", not "ANYONE"! ;-)
Paul B.
i think that these researchers are likely going in the wrong direction. The way I see it, the main problem with things like sonar isn't lack of signals or information. It's processing that information and coming up with useful data. The impressive thing about bats is that they can use the data they resieve meaningfully, not that they can recieve it. once they start writing software that can accurately map a 3d landscape on sonar alone, i'll be more impressed. proxy
BTW, that URL shows me using a pair of screen windows to "fend" one off (I was only armed with a frisbee) - I figured that would provide a pretty good radar return as "solid" surface.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
If any biologists are reading this, I wonder if any other terrestrial nocturnal animals use echolocation? I know that some birds (owls in particular) are very good in low-light conditions, do any of them navigate with sound as well?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Its just not cricket.
This sig is intentionally blank
Who says the visual spectrum of the EM band is the best way to interperit the world.
Wet, the only way to be sure if something is wet is to touch it (or put some other sensor into or onto it. I've seen lots of thengs that "looked" wet but it was just the glossy type look.
Soft, Sound is a MUCH better indicator for softness than sight. We've learnt that certain things look hard and soft. it's no measure if they are or not. You can make a barbell out of foam and with a good paint job it will look exactly like the real thing until you touch it. it won't however sound like a solid piece of metal. the returning sound will be muted / distorted.
Alive, see soft. I've seen people make realistic looking things on the beach. They could never have been alive, but they can look it.
Sorry bot the 3 examples you've used would have to be the worst 3. A more likely reason we have 2 eyes is we were origionally predators. We notice movement and distance well. It helps us hunt. As sight is effectivly passive (we don't have to shine light out of our eyes) it allows us to be more stealthy.
While bats use sonar, it's an active sensor. you have to keep making sound to use it. If more predatory animals used sonar to hunt, then more hunted animals would be able to detect it.
Back on topic however, If naval sonar is so advanced, why is atmospheric sonar so lacking ?
isn't it essentually a timing thing (sound travels faster in denser mediums like water than air). put a different emitter on and then adjust the timings.
Oh and if you're just sitting down, not moving etc can anyone see that you're drunk ?
sonar does, indeed, suck. and not in the fun way.
/anyways/ pretty much seal the deal.
why, you ask?
1) it's an active sensing modality (unless you've got a really bigass submarine with phased passive sonar arrays and a huge baseline, you're not going to get any range data out of the thing passively).
2) it's really damn tricky to process properly. sonar tends to fail in littoral waters because of multipath, echos, etc. in man made environments, the multipath + echo issues become really damn hard to solve without some good 3D models of the world around you (but if you can build those models, why bother with the sonar?)
3) signal to noise ratios are killer. this coupled with the innate difficulties in processing sonar
4) compared to other sensing modalities for non-aquatic environments, sonar just can't compete. if you have a single, calibrated camera and know its pose relative to the ground, you can calculate the exact position of any object on the ground. (more generally: if you know the pose of the camera relative to a known plane, you can precisely determine the position of any point on that plane up to what the camera's resolution will allow) if you have a stereo head, things get a lot more interesting (you can combine stereo imaging with structure from motion and get some highly accurate ranges).
that all said, if this research can solve those problems, i know i will gladly use their sonar / echolocation stuff (it can't be blinded by the sun, unlike ladars, although both will have major issues with rain).
One project partner developed a broadband transducer that could both convert acoustical energy to electrical energy and electrical to acoustical across the 20 to 200 kHz spectrum.
Now all we need to do is train bats to repeat what they hear, and we will have wireless TCP/IP by bat.I, for one, welcome our new robotic homerun hitting overlords.
Still IMing in the stone age?
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.
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.
Not exactly. Sonar ("SOund Navigation And Ranging") uses sound but radar ("RAdio Detection And Ranging") uses radio.
Or more correctly Cillia.
A single (ignore the pair for direction for a moment) detector element is not going to get any accurate (3D) results, no matter how good the post processing.
Also the shape of the ear is minor in comparison to the "array" of information from the messages the individual hairs(cillia) send to the brain. Not saying they're wasting their time, just that it will likely be sub-optimal by design. Also I'd bet the hair pattern(layout) is more important than the over all shape too. But then IANAB* so what do I know.
(*I Am Not A Bat)
Back on topic however, If naval sonar is so advanced, why is atmospheric sonar so lacking ? isn't it essentually a timing thing (sound travels faster in denser mediums like water than air). put a different emitter on and then adjust the timings.
Air and water have very different sonic properties. Air is highly compressible, water is less so. Sounds travel short distances in air compared to water... etc.
Sonar was developed because you can't see underwater. The military has invested huge sums refining it. Above ground we can see, so nobody's bothered researching air-based sonar to the same degree.
Seriously this reminds me of an apartment I almost rented years ago... it was an attic of a building; there was a guy living there who was moving out in a few weeks and I was about to hand over the money when I noticed a butterfly net near his futon .... Being a smartass I was like, "Hey, are you a lepidopterist?" He said no, no, that's for the bats. Huh? "Oh it's no big deal - they show up every once in a while. You just turn on the radio to confuse their sonar and catch them with this net." OK, then what do I do? The guy picks up a baseball bat... "You hit it a few times with this bat until it stops moving and then you can flush it down the toilet." I almost lost my lunch right there. I wound up renting a room on the first floor -- so I lived in the house but I never ventured up to the attic after that story. I think bats are really cool but I could not imagine having to catch them and kill them in my bedroom on a regular enough basis to keep a net next to my bed.
... so does wearing a tinfoil hat help protect you from these robotic bats?
Or does tinfoil help "bounce" the sounds back and give them a better target!?!
It is getting so hard to be paranoid these days.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Not sure If I'm for or against this.
On the one hand, bats are scary.
And yet everyone likes a little head.
we had always wondered why our cats were going into the room and jumping about.
Hah. I imagine a flying rodent would be a cat's idea of great fun. Smells like a mouse, flits about like a small bird, add some catnip and it might just be too much to handle altogether.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman