A design for a dynamic biomimetic sonarhead inspired by horseshoe bats.

The noseleaf and pinnae of horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus ferrumequinum) have both been shown to actively deform during biosonar operation. Since these baffle structures directly affect the properties of the animals biosonar system, this work mimics horseshoe bat sonar system with the goal of developing a platform to study the dynamic sensing principles horseshoe bats employ. Consequently, two robotic devices were developed to mimic the dynamic emission and reception characteristics of horseshoe bats.

A Unified Analysis of Structured Sonar-terrain Data using Bayesian Functional Mixed Models.

Sonar emits pulses of sound and uses the reflected echoes to gain information about target objects. It offers a low cost, complementary sensing modality for small robotic platforms. While existing analytical approaches often assume independence across echoes, real sonar data can have more complicated structures due to device setup or experimental design.

Dynamic Substrate for the Physical Encoding of Sensory Information in Bat Biosonar.

Horseshoe bats have dynamic biosonar systems with interfaces for ultrasonic emission (reception) that change shape while diffracting the outgoing (incoming) sound waves. An information-theoretic analysis based on numerical and physical prototypes shows that these shape changes add sensory information (mutual information between distant shape conformations <20%), increase the number of resolvable directions of sound incidence, and improve the accuracy of direction finding. These results demonstrate that horseshoe bats have a highly effective substrate for dynamic encoding of sensory information.

A dynamic ultrasonic emitter inspired by horseshoe bat noseleaves.

The emission of biosonar pulses in horseshoe bats (family Rhinolophidae) differs from technical sonar in that it has dynamic features at the interface to the free field. When the horseshoe bats emit their biosonar pulses through the nostrils, the walls of a horn-shaped baffle (anterior leaf) are in motion while diffracting the outgoing ultrasonic wave packets. Here, biomimetic reproductions of the dynamic emission shapes of horseshoe bats have been studied for their ability to impose time-variant signatures onto the outgoing pulses.

Eigenbeam analysis of the diversity in bat biosonar beampatterns.

A quantitative analysis of the interspecific variability in bat biosonar beampatterns has been carried out on 267 numerical predictions of emission and reception beampatterns from 98 different species. Since these beampatterns did not share a common orientation, an alignment was necessary to analyze the variability in the shape of the patterns. To achieve this, beampatterns were aligned using a pairwise optimization framework based on a rotation-dependent cost function.