Science Daily April 15, 2021
Inspired by the bat ears, researchers at Virginia Tech designed a soft-robotic sensor that mimics fast non-rigid deformation of the ears in bats. They placed the ear above a microphone, creating a mechanism similar to that of a bat. The fast motions of the fluttering outer ear of the bat created Doppler shift signatures. To interpret this complex pattern, they trained a computer to provide the source direction associated with each received echo using deep neural network. Once the direction of the sound was determined, the control computer would rotate the rig so that the laser pointer hit a target attached to the loudspeaker. The best technology in use currently has achieved location within 7.5 degrees. In this research the doppler shift signatures generated by these motions to estimate the direction of a sound source with an estimation error of ~0.5°. The researchers hope to bring reliable and capable autonomy to complex outdoor environments, including precision agriculture and forestry; environmental surveillance, such as biodiversity monitoring; as well as defense and security-related applications…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Experimental set-up. Credit: Nature Machine Intelligence (2021)Â