AntBot is able to go home like desert ants

International audienceAutonomous navigation is one of the leading technological challenges of the 21 st century in the fields of the automotive industry, air and maritime transport, and mobile robotics. To be functional, such systems must perform multi-sensor data fusion provided by the GPS and other devices like radars and embedded cameras. Although well-performing, the accuracy of the civilian GPS is hampered by both the urban infrastructures surrounding the vehicle and the meteorological conditions. Camera-based strategies are also able to precisely estimate the vehicle's position in its environment, but the data processing requires important computational resources, and the performances depend on the stability of the lightening conditions. However, when put together, all these techniques are capable of compensating for their disadvantages with interesting results. The challenge is to develop brand new navigation systems reliable enough to increase the robustness and the accuracy of the localization of vehicles, aircrafts, ships and robots in a wide range of environmental and meteorological conditions. We have developed a hexapod walking robot, called AntBot, inspired by desert ants Cataglyphis fortis