X-ORCA - A Biologically Inspired Low-Cost Localization System

In nature, localization is a very fundamental task for which natural evolution has come up with many powerful solutions. In technical applications, however, localization is still quite a challenge, since most ready-to-use systems are not satisfactory in terms of costs, resolution, and effective range. This paper proposes a new localization system that is largely inspired by auditory system of the barn owl. A first prototype has been implemented on a low-cost field-programmable gate array and is able to determine the time difference of two 300 MHz signals with a resolution of about 0.02 ns, even though the device is clocked as slow as 85 MHz. X-ORCA is able to achieve this performance by adopting some of the core properties of the biological role model. hardware implementation, robotics, architecture