Meeting Abstract
Diverse taxa use Earth’s magnetic field in conjunction with other sensory modalities to accomplish navigation tasks ranging from local homing to long-distance migration across continents and ocean basins. However, despite extensive research, how animals use Earth’s magnetic field in a strategy to successfully navigate is an active area of investigation. Concurrently, Earth’s magnetic field offers a signal that engineered systems can leverage for navigation in environments where man-made systems such as GPS are unavailable or unreliable. Building on previous work, this study uses a proxy for Earth’s magnetic field, and implements a behavioral strategy inspired by migratory animal behavior that uses combinations of magnetic field properties as rare or unique signatures to mark specific locations. In particular, this work allows constant lines of proxy inclination and intensity to be either rectilinear or curvilinear, and rotated relative to one another so that they are either perpendicular or non-uniformly non-perpendicular. The strategy is tested under a variety of environmental parameters (e.g., rotation angle, degree of curvilinearity), and strategy parameters (e.g., measurement frequency, measurement noise). The results provide support for existing notions of some animals using combinations of magnetic properties as navigational markers, and provides insights into features and constraints that may enable navigational success or failure. The findings also offer insight into how autonomous engineered platforms might be designed to leverage the magnetic field as a navigational resource.
