Phys.org April 30, 2021 Full 3D information based on echo-location requires some form of scanning of the scene to provide the spatial location of the echo origin-points. Without this spatial information, imaging objects in 3D is a challenging task as the inverse retrieval problem is strongly ill-posed. Researchers in the UK showed that the temporal information encoded in the return echoes that are reflected multiple times within a scene is sufficient to faithfully render an image in 3D. Numerical modelling and an information theoretic perspective proved the concept and provided insight into the role of the multipath information. They experimentally […]
Tag Archives: Echolocation
Researcher uses bat-inspired design to develop new approach to sound location
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 […]
Robot-bat, ‘Robat,’ uses sound to navigate and map a novel environment
Science Daily September 6, 2018 An international team of researchers (Israel, Switzerland) developed ‘Robat’—a fully autonomous bat-like terrestrial robot that relies on echolocation to move through a novel environment while mapping it solely based on sound. Using the echoes reflected from the environment, the Robat delineates the borders of objects it encounters, and classifies them using an artificial neural-network, thus creating a rich map of its environment. Unlike most previous attempts to apply sonar in robotics, they focus on a biological bat-like approach, which relies on a single emitter and two ears, and they apply a biological plausible signal processing […]