A Doppler-based motion controller for an echolocating mobile robot

From the study of biological acoustic sensorimotor systems it can be seen that Doppler is a rich source of information which is not exploited by commercial ultrasonic range sensors such as the Polaroid. In this work we present a simple collision detection and convoy controller for RoBat, a mobile robot provided with a biomimetic sonarhead, based on the presence or absence of Doppler shifts in the received echos while navigating in real life scenarios. Preliminary results using another robot moving along RoBat’s path show how exploiting the physics of the robot and the environment before going to higher levels of abstraction results in a simple and efficient way for collision detection and smooth convoy navigation.