Biomimetic sonar for biomimetic SLAM

Abstract

We present a biomimetic sonar system consisting of a single emitter and two receivers endowed with realistic spatial filter characteristics by inserting them in plastic replicas of bat pinnae. The outputs of these receivers are processed by a simple functional model of the processing performed in the cochlea. We show that these cochleograms contain sufficient amounts of information for the robust localization of a robot in unmodified office environments. This localization component is part of a more general biomimetic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping system (SLAM) for an autonomous robot based on a model of the rodent Hippocampus and the use of sonar instead of vision as exteroceptive sensory input (BatSLAM). To quantify the performance of the biomimetic sonar system in the robot localization task, and to be able to quantitatively compare the performance of different types of (sonar) sensors, we propose a technique based on conditional entropy.