Meeting Abstract
Diverse taxa use Earth’s magnetic field to navigate both locally, and across global scales. Several of these animals have demonstrated the ability to use magnetic inclination (i.e., the angle between the magnetic field vector and the surface of the earth) as a means of poleward or equatorward orientation. However, it is unknown how this sense functionally enables successful navigation or migratory behavior. It is also unclear how animal navigation strategies negotiate the long and short period temporal drift in the magnetic field. Inspired by animal behavior, we task an artificial agent with executing a series of trans-equatorial migrations using sequential measurements of magnetic inclination. The agent is tested both in a static magnetic field, and a temporally dynamic magnetic field that can have long and short period variation, similar in nature to the temporal variation observed in the real geomagnetic field. The findings 1) demonstrate that using sequential inclination measurements is a feasible way to execute a trans-equatorial migration, and 2) examine whether an inclination-based navigation strategy can be tolerant of temporal magnetic field effects. The results can help gain insight into how animals navigate using magnetic inclination to navigate, particularly as the magnetic field changes over time. Additionally, the results may be useful in the development of new autonomous engineered navigation systems that can use the temporally shifting field as a reference, independent of satellite-based navigation technologies.
