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Record-setting drone utilizes ant-inspired smarts to make its way home
By Ben Coxworth
July 18, 2024

The drone utilizes an omnidirectional camera to take snapshots of its surroundings – much like ants do with their large compound eyes
The drone utilizes an omnidirectional camera to take snapshots of its surroundings – much like ants do with their large compound eyesTU Delft
VIEW 2 IMAGES

Tiny aerial drones have many potential uses, but their ability to
navigate is severely limited by their minuscule amount of onboard
processing power. Scientists have now set about addressing that
limitation, taking a cue from foraging insects such as ants.

Among other things, micro drones could one day be performing tasks such
as searching for survivors at disaster sites, performing reconnaissance
in hazardous environments, or even pollinating crops. In almost all
cases, they will be required to autonomously fly out into a specific
area, then return to their home base.

When it comes to getting back to base, navigation options currently
include GPS when outdoors, or wireless wayfinding-beacon modules when
indoors. That said, GPS doesn't work in indoor environments, and
wayfinding modules aren't likely to be preinstalled in most buildings.

Larger drones may utilize LiDAR and computer vision systems to create 3D
maps of their surroundings on their way out, which they subsequently
follow to make their way back. Creating such maps requires a lot of
processing power and memory, however, which the tiny microprocessors in
micro drones simply can't provide.

One previously proposed alternative involves getting such drones to
simply take a series of snapshot photos of their surroundings on their
way out. On their way back – assuming they follow the same route – they just seek out the landmarks in those snapshots, in the reverse order
that they were taken. While this is a more efficient method of
navigation, the number of snapshots required still requires too much memory.

In order to drastically reduce that number, scientists at The
Netherlands' Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) looked to ants
and other foraging insects. Ants essentially take mental snapshots as
they head out from their colony, but they also (roughly) count the
number of steps they take between those snapshots.

This step-counting process, known as odometry, allows them to get away
with taking much fewer snapshots than would otherwise be required. They
just match their surroundings to one snapshot, take the memorized number
of steps, then check the next snapshot. That procedure is repeated
snapshot after snapshot, until the insect reaches its colony.

The diminutive CrazyFlie drone utilized in the study
The diminutive CrazyFlie drone utilized in the studyTU Delft
Led by professors Tom van Dijk and Guido de Croon, the TU Delft team
applied this same principle to a 56-gram (2-oz) CrazyFlie miniature
quadcopter which they equipped with an omnidirectional camera. Of
course, aerial drones don't walk, so the copter can't count its steps
like an ant.

"For odometry, our drone does something similar to honeybees, it
integrates the motion determined from optical flow," de Croon tells us.
"For this, our robot has a small downward-pointing camera that tracks
how quickly things pass by in the visual field."

What's more, that camera also tracks the direction in which the ground
passes beneath it.

On its return trip, once the drone has determined that it has travelled
the recorded distance/direction from one recorded snapshot, it compares
its current camera image to the next recorded snapshot. Given the fact
that the aircraft will inevitably have drifted a bit on its way back, it corrects its course until the two images almost exactly match.

"Suppose that there is a tree in sight and it is larger in the snapshot
image than the current image. Then the drone needs to move towards that
tree, as it will then become bigger in the image as well," explains de
Croon.

Navigating in this fashion within an indoor environment, the drone was
able to autonomously make its way back to base along a winding 100-meter (328-ft) obstacle course using just 1.16 kilobytes of memory – that's
well within the capacity of most commercial micro drones. In fact, the quadcopter reportedly now holds the record for being the lightest drone
to ever perform vision-based navigation.

You can see it in action, in the following video. A paper on the
research was recently published in the journal Science Robotics.


Visual Route-following for Tiny Autonomous Robots - Science Robotics
Source: TU Delft

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