What Can Be Like a Bee? A Drone
March 11, 2021
Drones are mainly associated with aerial photography, eventual package deliveries, and unmanned attacks. None of these, however, drive drone scientists to improve the robot technology. What really moves them forward is the desire to replicate bees’ graceful movements and fully seeing flowers’ ultimate beauty says Science Daily in the article, “Appreciating A Flower’s Texture, Color, And Shapes Leads To Better Drone Landings.”
Technically it should be impossible for bees to fly, but reality proves that idea wrong. Bees are amazing navigators who use optical flow, perceiving an object’s speed in their view field. Robotics researchers designed an algorithm based off the optical view concept to allow robots to judge distances by visual cues (colors, shapes, and textures).
Drones will learn from the optical flow AI, but the concept has limitations:
“Optical flow has two fundamental limitations that have been widely described in the growing literature on bio-inspired robotics. The first is that optical flow only provides mixed information on distances and velocities — and not on distance or velocity separately. To illustrate, if there are two landing drones and one of them flies twice as high and twice as fast as the other drone, then they experience exactly the same optical flow. However, for good control these two drones should actually react differently to deviations in the optical flow divergence. If a drone does not adapt its reactions to the height when landing, it will never arrive and start to oscillate above the landing surface. Second, for obstacle avoidance it is very unfortunate that in the direction in which a robot is moving, the optical flow is very small. This means that in that direction, optical flow measurements are noisy and hence provide very little information on the presence of obstacles. Hence, the most important obstacles — the ones that the robot is moving towards — are actually the hardest ones to detect!
The limitations can be fixed if robots can interpret optical flow and visual appearances of objects in their field. Seeing some distance by visual appearances resulted in better landings for drones.
Learning how to land the drones leads to better understanding of insects’ intelligence. Biology and robotics do not often mesh outside of science fiction, but tiny bees could leads to advances in robotic navigation.
Whitney Grace, March 11, 2021
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
