Drone Robot with Echolocation System

Science is always inspired by nature to develop new advancements in machines. Following the herd, the researchers from the University of Toronto observed the bat and other animals that use echolocation to navigate themselves. And they developed a small drone robot based on the echolocation method of a hand palm size.

This tiny drone robot does not require any expensive and heavy components like hardware. According to PopSci, the research team had used their Puck Robot hardware, and for audio, they had used low-cost mic and speakers.

This system operates similarly to bat echolocation. It produces sounds of different frequencies, and the robot’s microphone catches it after reflecting back from surfaces. These reflected sound waves are analyzed by an algorithm and produce a map of the room’s dimensions.

The researchers examine a drawback that this algorithm is not fully developed for active echolocation, and it mostly relies on hardware requirements that can’t be fulfilled by small robots.

Coming to the advantages of this real-time and algorithm-based echolocation model is that it doesn’t require any pretraining or calibration, and it can be a useful robot for search and rescue operations and exploring such areas that larger robots couldn’t since this model requires an audio component and additional hardware, so it holds a wide range of potential applications.