IIT researchers uncover the science behind animal homing using a robot
The robot is created in a way that it replicates the movement of an animal like finding food and then returning home.
We have always wondered how our dogs come back home from distant places without any navigating devices. Well, the researchers from IIT Bombay have discovered how animal homing allows animals to find their way back home without getting lost. They used a robot to mimic the animal’s movement. The researcher from the physics department made the discovery.
The robot is created in a way that it replicates the movement of an animal like finding food and then returning home using light to guide it. IIT Bombay said in a statement on Tuesday.
“The primary goal of our research group was to understand the physics of active and living systems. We achieve this by performing experiments on centimetres-sized self-propelled programmable robots,” Dr Nitin Kumar, Assistant professor at the Department of Physics, IIT Bombay, said. “In simple words, we model these robots to mimic the dynamics of living organisms, both at the individual and collective levels,” Kumar added.
Aims and Results
The researchers aimed to calculate the time taken by the robot to return home amid excessive deviations on the way back home. They found out that the reorientation rate ( which was considered as the frequency at which the robot/animal alters its direction for successful homing) came from the amount of randomness in the path.
The results showcased an ‘optimal reorientation rate’ for a definite degree of randomness beyond which the adverse effects of increased randomness are negated by more frequent reorientations, leading to successful homing.
This theory concluded that animals also have evolved to reorient themselves at an ideal rate to successfully carry out the homing, keeping aside all the disturbance of nature.
According to it, Kumar said, “The observation of a finite upper limit on return times indicates that the homing motion is inherently efficient. Our results demonstrated that if animals are always aware of the direction of their home and always correct their course whenever they deviate from the intended direction, they will surely get home within a finite time.”
The physical experiment was backed by computer stimulation, which was conducted to ensure the result. “This virtual robot combines active Brownian motion (the random motion of particles in a liquid or gas, caused by collisions with fast-moving atoms or molecules in the fluid) with occasional resets to its orientation to correct its course back towards home.”
Explaining its relevance in biological systems, Kumar said, “When we applied this model to the trajectories of a real biological system of a flock of homing pigeons, it showed a good agreement with our theory, validating our hypothesis of enhanced efficiency due to frequent course corrections,”
He said, “In our future research, we aim to model these scenarios in our experiment by using a combination of spatiotemporal variations in light intensity and physical obstacles,”
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