Creating an insect-inspired autonomous robot navigation strategy
Summary
If they can be produced cost-effectively, they could be deployed in large numbers to quickly cover extensive areas, such as greenhouses for early pest or disease detection. Existing AI for autonomous navigation has been designed for larger robots, such as self-driving cars, which use heavy, power-intensive sensors like LiDAR. If the visual surroundings get too different from that at the snapshot location, the robot may move in the wrong direction and never get back anymore. Guido de Croon commented: “The proposed insect-inspired navigation strategy is an important step towards applying tiny autonomous robots in the real world. For instance, for stock tracking in warehouses or crop monitoring in greenhouses, drones could fly out, gather data, and then return to the base station.