A survey of desert ant navigation

Author

Jun, Gao ; Lei, Wang ; Xuezhi, Yang

Author_Institution

Sch. of Comput. & Inf., Hefei Univ. of Technol., China

fYear

2005

fDate

27 June-3 July 2005

Abstract

Desert ant (Cataglyphis) is famous for its ability in navigation. In a desert with very few visual and odor information, the ant can return it´s den almost along a straight line after foraging away in a distance of much more than thousands of times of it´s body length. Two main mechanisms compose Cataglyphis´s navigational toolbox: path integration and visual navigation. Path integration is achieved by using sky light compass based on polarized light and odometer, while visual navigation relies on landmark based memory and matching. In this paper, a survey of research work on desert ant navigation is presented, as well as the application of these navigation mechanism of desert ant to robots´ navigation, especially bionic robots cruising in strange environment.

Keywords

biocybernetics; distance measurement; mobile robots; navigation; Cataglyphis navigational toolbox; bionic robot; desert ant navigation; landmark based matching; landmark based memory; odometer; path integration; polarized light; robot navigation; sky light compass; visual navigation; Biomedical optical imaging; Layout; Machine intelligence; Motion planning; Navigation; Optical polarization; Photoreceptors; Planets; Retina; Robots;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Information Acquisition, 2005 IEEE International Conference on

Print_ISBN

0-7803-9303-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICIA.2005.1635062

Filename

1635062