Outdoor Phonotaxis

Our most recent experiments have been using a 'Whegs' robot, designed at the Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab at CWRU, to do cricket sound localisation outdoors. The following mpeg files show the robot in action. A paper on this research will be presented at ICAR 2003.

whegs phonotaxis (4.4MB)
This shows the whegs robot doing phonotaxis to cricket song outdoors. In these trials it got there more often than not. Later trials worked better (10/10) after tweaking the steering settings a little.

whegs phonotaxis from sides (5.9MB)
Three tracks where the robot has to turn to reach the sound. Shows two that worked and one that didn't.

whegs phonotaxis closeup (4.9MB)
Some shots from behind the speaker showing the behaviour of the robot from close up.

whegs phonotaxis in the frost and dark with tethers...(6.3 MB)
This is during the collection of tether tracking data - in December, 2002, in sub-zero temperatures. By the time everything was working it was also getting dark so the videos are very poor, but may give you some idea of how it looked. The tethers slow whegs down somewhat. However it was very reliable in reaching the sound source.