The development of a bio-inspired magnetoelectrosensory navigation system

In addition to their ubiquitous abilities for navigation at small spatial scales, a host of animals migrate long distances through the open ocean or skies. The mechanisms underlying these powerful navigational abilities are slowly being decoded. This progress offers the opportunity to develop low cost navigational systems for use in future autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) designs. As future AUVs come to emphasize low size and cost for deployment of larger numbers of AUVs for a given task, such systems are desirable. In this proposal, we focus on low cost, bio-inspired multisensory navigation through the combination of three different sensory modalities: active electrosense, geomagnetic sensing, and inductive magnetosense. We propose to use geomagnetic sensing for sensing the local direction of the magnetic field, inductive magnetosense for velocity sensing, and active electrosense for high resolution localization and object collision avoidance.