Providing an autonomous hexapod walking robot with the ability to reorientate: application of a novel ant-inspired celestial compass

Julien Dupeyroux (1, 2) , Stéphane Viollet (1, 3) , Julien Serres (1, 2)

1 ISM - Institut des Sciences du Mouvement Etienne Jules Marey
2 AMU - Aix Marseille Université
3 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Insects like desert ants have photoreceptors in their Dorsal Rim Area sensitive to the ultraviolet skylight polarization pattern. Taking inspiration from insects allows us to develop smart sensors. A bio-inspired celestial compass has been developed in the aim of stabilizing the heading of a hexapod robot, which can estimate its heading direction from the linearly polarized skylight in the ultraviolet (UV) range. Field results will be presented and will show their reliability and accuracy with respect to various weather conditions. Finally, our celestial compass can be used as an alternative to both magnetometers failure in highly disturbed environment, and GPS limited precision.

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]; Electronics; Computer Science [cs]; Robotics [cs.RO]; Engineering Sciences [physics]; Automatic

Julien Dupeyroux, Stéphane Viollet, Julien Serres. Providing an autonomous hexapod walking robot with the ability to reorientate: application of a novel ant-inspired celestial compass. Journée des Jeunes Chercheurs en Robotique (JJCR 2017), Nov 2017, Bayonne, France. ⟨hal-01643195⟩