Meeting Abstract
Diverse taxa use Earth’s magnetic field in concert with other sensory modalities to accomplish long-distance migration across continents and ocean basins. However, despite extensive research, how animals use Earth’s magnetic field to navigate is an active area of investigation. Earth’s magnetic field can also be leveraged for navigation by engineered systems in environments where man-made systems such as GPS are unavailable or unreliable. Some animals use combinations of magnetic inclination and intensity as rare or unique signatures that mark specific locations to enable migration, but the viability of this type of strategy depends on the local magnetic topography. The closer lines of constant magnetic inclination and intensity are to parallel, the more adversity this strategy may face. Inspired by migratory animal behavior, this study implements a magnetic signatures-based multimodal sensing navigation strategy to migrate in an environment that simulates the northern Atlantic Ocean, a seemingly challenging region for a signatures-based algorithm. The strategy uses the magnetic field as a sensory signal to migrate to a prescribed set of points, and must also negotiate a fluid current that simulates the north Atlantic gyre. The strategy contains only a high level representation of the magnetic topography, not an explicit map. The results demonstrate the ability of a signatures based strategy to navigate, and the importance of the interaction between the strategy’s implementation, the sensory signal, and external environmental factors that can influence a platform’s motion. The findings can be used to better understand animal navigation, and to design new engineered navigation systems that are less dependent on satellite-based navigation.
