An Insect-inspired Targeting/evasion Reflex for Autonomous Air Vehicles

Introduction Animals must integrate large amounts of sensor information to orient movement towards goals and away from threats, often in milliseconds, to survive. Identical directives are faced by autonomous air vehicles; particularly rapid assimilation of surroundings and instantaneous obstacle avoidance. Nature, through evolution and natural selection, has optimized this behavior. In particular, insects initiate actions reflexively in situations where no time for detailed information processing or planned decision making is possible. Possession of similar capabilities would increase the performance, speed and accuracy of all unmanned aerial systems. The Systems Engineering Department at the Naval Postgraduate School, in conjunction with Case Western Reserve University (Case), propose developing a revolutionary set of biologically based artificial reflexes enabling instantaneous collision avoidance capabilities for unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) and comparing its performance to traditional optimal control methodologies.