Insect Navigation and Communication in Flight and Migration: A Potential Model for Joining and Collision Avoidance in MAVs and Mobile Robots Fleet Control

摘要

The human being should be awarded thechampionship of navigation on the planet, on the virtues thatthey not only have invented and manufactured the compass,GPS, aircraft, vessel, spacecraft, but also have demonstratedexceptional non-instrumental navigation skills.12 TheAustronesian expansion from the Asian mainland into thePacific performed by the Pacific navigators, who eventuallypopulated the most remote islands of the Pacific about 4000years ago, is a vivid example (Wehner 1998). However,animals, especially flying birds and insects are strongcontenders. Monarch butterflies can migrate up to 2000miles from their reproductive sites in the eastern US andCanada to their over-wintering sites in the forests ofMexico, and it is postulated that they may possess abiological equivalent of a low-resolution GPS system that isbased on the magnetic field of the earth. In fact, even thelong-legged ants (Cataglyphis fortis) in the Saharan desertuse the dead-reckoning navigation strategy, which isattributed to the Polynesians, but the ants apparently haveacquired the capability much earlier, given the relative shortevolutionary history of humans. In this article, we brieflyreview the state-of-the-art research on insect navigation andcommunication used in flight and communication, with theobjective to inspire cross-disciplinary studies in aerospaceengineering, biology and computer science.