Optimising landmark-based route guidance for older drivers

Pigeons combine compass and landmark guidance in familiar route navigation.

How do birds orient over familiar terrain? In the best studied avian species, the homing pigeon (Columba livia), two apparently independent primary mechanisms are currently debated: either memorized visual landmarks provide homeward guidance directly, or birds rely on a compass to home from familiar locations. Using miniature Global Positioning System tracking technology and clock-shift procedu...

Landmark Classification for Route Directions

In order for automated navigation systems to operate effectively, the route instructions they produce must be clear, concise and easily understood by users. In order to incorporate a landmark within a coherent sentence, it is necessary to first understand how that landmark is conceptualised by travellers — whether it is perceived as point-like, linelike or area-like. This paper investigates the...

How desert ants use a visual landmark for guidance along a habitual route.

Many animals learn to follow habitual routes between important locations, but how they encode their routes is still largely unknown. Desert ants traveling between their nest and a food site develop stable, visually guided routes that can wind through desert scrub without the use of trail pheromones. Their route memories are sufficiently robust that if a nest-bound ant is caught at the end of it...

Intelligent Route Guidance

Cues for Vibro - tactile Route Guidance

In today’s modern and fast-paced world mobility is getting more and more important. One of the challenges with that is orientation in unknown places. Supporting technologies exist e.g. in the form of navigation devices, where most of them convey information through the auditory or visual channel. The modalities hearing and seeing have the advantage of being well explored and commonly used, but ...