Insect Inspired Robots.pdfVIP

Insect Inspired Robots John Lim1,2, Chris McCarthy1,2, David Shaw1,2, Luke Cole2, Nick Barnes1,2 1Department of Information Engineering, RSISE, 2National ICT Australia, Australian National University Australia {johnlim, cdmcc, davids}@.au, cole@, Nick.Barnes@.au Abstract Insect behaviour has been a rich source of in- spiration for the field of robotics as the percep- tion and navigation problems encountered by autonomous robots are faced also by insects. In this paper, we introduce a research plat- form, the Insectbot, that was built as a testbed for new biologically-inspired, vision-based algo- rithms and systems. The Insectbot is a ground- based robot but it is capable of simulating con- ditions of free flight. It is a robust testbed for flight navigation algorithms that offers advan- tages over other platforms such as helicopters, blimps and other air vehicles. We present the navigational behaviours currently implemented on this robot. Major subsytems include the well-known bee-inspired, corridor-centring be- haviour, a flow-based docking algorithm and feature detection algorithms. 1 Introduction Insects and other arthropods effortlessly navigate com- plex environments despite having relatively simple ner- vous systems. This is often attributed to robust and efficient motion control strategies where action and per- ception are closely coupled. Well-known visuo-motor be- haviours include the use of optical flow for flight sta- bilization, corridor-centring, flight odometry and the execution of smooth, grazing landings [Srinivasan and Zhang, 2004], some of which have already been suc- cessfully implemented in robots [Argyros et al., 2004; Iida, 2003]. These motion strategies exploit the advantages of spe- cialized eyes that provide sight over nearly the entire viewsphere. It has been shown that a spherical field of view is advantageous to the task of estimating self- motion [Fermuller and Aloimonos, 1998]. This may be a contributing factor as to why flying creature