Efficient robot navigation inspired by honeybee learning flights

Simulation experiments The results in Fig. 2 are based on two simulators: (1) a simplified simulator that was used to determine the ratio of the LHA versus the total navigation area; and (2) a visually realistic simulator that was used to test the visual homing with a convolutional neural network in various generated forest environments. Simplified simulator In this simulator, we simulate a drone flying outwards from a starting position for a given time period and then trying to return straight home. Reflecting the real experiments, we model the drone as using a noisy gyroscope measurement for updating its heading and a noisy velocity measurement for estimating its travel distance. During both the outbound and the inbound flight, the drone determines its position with the help of path integration. Owing to the noisy nature of the heading update and the velocity estimation, the path-integration-estimated position will increasingly drift from the ground-truth position. We use a Gaussian noise model for path integration drift 22 , 27 , 53 . For ‘compass-less’ path integration, as performed by the real drone, the model adds noise to the heading estimate after each time step in the simulation. To this end, samples are drawn from the normal distribution \({\varepsilon }_{\psi }\sim {\mathcal{N}}(0,t{\sigma }_{\psi }^{2})\) , in which t is the time in seconds. …