For my final, I will be working with Anand to fine tune and expand upon my midterm project. As you may recall, my midterm was centered around the method of imprinting found in animals, namely birds. Imprinting usually occurs immediately after birth; organisms such as ducklings have been recorded to imprint on the first object they see, whether it be shoes or other animals such as dogs. One of the most noticeable behaviors that result from imprinting is that the animal will follow the organism it has imprinted on, as demonstrated by this video:
As you can see, the duckling has imprinted on the dog, and will essentially follow it everywhere. Once the imprint has solidified, it is extremely difficult to break. Here is another demonstration of ducklings imprinting on the mother duckling:
So with these examples in mind, we wanted to emulate the most basic imprinting behavior by having multiple bots follow a ‘mother’ bot, matching both speed and angle change accordingly. In order to do so, we will continue to utilize the dual-ultrasound technique that I used in my midterm, where essentially each motor is connected to its own ultrasound sensor. This allows for smooth, quick turning, as well as accurate bot-to-bot sensing.
Dual-ultrasound:
Some improvements that we intend to add would be distance adjustment for the ‘duckling’ bot relative to the ‘mother’ bot, meaning that the babies will follow the mother, but maintain a set distance from behind, in order to avoid collision. We will also fine tune the reactive turning to emulate smoother motion, and add more bots to form a true duckling line. Lastly, since my midterm ducklings had some trouble detecting the back of the mother bot, we also want to add some sort of ‘detection plate’ to the rear, so that the bot will have a larger marker to detect.
Our expected product of this project would be a set of fully functional ducklings (complete with smooth motion and accurate detection), as well as a mother duck to act as the line leader.