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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 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
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).
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.
Yup, although it's a purely passive system. There's a fairly extensive overview of how moths detect bats' echolocation pulses. The behavior is kind of interesting... If the moth hears a weak sound (indicating the bat is far away), the moths will just turn around and fly away. If the sound is moderate, the moth will start looping around or stop flapping its wings and flutter down like a leaf. If the sound is really loud, indicating that the moth has a few milliseconds before it becomes bat food, the moth will suddenly fold its wings in and dive down as fast as it can.
One of my profs mentioned that if you make really high-pitched noises around moths, you can initiate the various evasive maneuvers. I can't remember how to make the noise... maybe something like rubbing aluminum foil together could do it.
There's also a similar page on the neuroethology of bat echolocation.
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.