Scientists at The Netherlands' Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) have drawn inspiration from the behavior of ants to develop a novel navigation technique for lightweight drones. The idea is for these devices to be able to travel long distances and automatically find their way back, without GPS, but with knowledge of their environment.

Ants are able to find their way back thanks to biological mechanisms, which directly inspired these scientists. In fact, ants visually recognise their surroundings while counting their steps, enabling them to return to their starting point with relative ease. The researchers wanted to apply these principles to small drones, using algorithms requiring both very little computational power and memory.

The resulting test drone, named CrazyFlie, weighs just 56 grams. But thanks to its omnidirectional camera, it managed to make its way back to base along a 100-meter obstacle course fully autonomously using just 1.16 kilobytes of memory. All visual processing for path recognition is carried out using an integrated circuit, demonstrating the feasibility of this autonomous navigation technique for such small, lightweight drones.

In the future, these drones could be used to monitor stock levels or detect leaks of all kinds. Indeed, their small size and light weight enable them to navigate in tight or confined spaces that are inaccessible to humans. Previously, these kinds of drones had limited resources, making autonomous navigation difficult. This research is outlined in the journal Science Robotics.

It's not the first time that insects have inspired researchers in developing new technologies. Today, in robotics, the trend is more than ever towards “biorobots”, inspired by animal behaviour.

In Japan, for example, tiny cockroach-shaped robots have been created to move around in any natural environment inaccessible to humans, inspecting the quality of the environment thanks to various onboard sensors.

Meanwhile, in the US, tiny winged microchips have been developed to monitor the evolution of pollution or certain diseases in specific regions.

 - AFP Relaxnews