Principles of Biological Echolocation Applied to Radar Sensing: Applying Biomimetic Sensors to Achieve Autonomous Navigation

This article introduces the application of principles from biological echolocation to radar sensing. A novel biomimetic radar sensor is presented whose features are based on the relevant morphology of a bat. Signal properties accessible to bats as well as biologically feasible processing techniques are discussed, and we show how they translate to the domain of pulseecho radar. We demonstrate that by applying these techniques, our radar system can achieve a 3D localization of reflectors, and in combining that localization with a custom subsumption control architecture, we have realized a robotic platform capable of autonomous navigation through an unknown environment. Finally, we employ a specialized simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm during autonomous navigation and show that it is capable of building an accurate topological map of the environment using radar as the only source of exteroceptive information.