7. Conclusions on the AntBot robot

7.1 Autonomous navigation

In order to determine a course, a parsimonious sensor was designed to measure the polarization of sky light at the zenith of the celestial vault, with just two UV-sensitive pixels and very low computational resource requirements. To reproduce the whole of the ant's marginal dorsal area (DRA), the filters were rotated. By combining this pair of photodiodes with rotated linear polarizing filters, the celestial compass is equivalent to two rows of 374 pixels, each set to a single AdP. This solution provides a sensor with properties comparable to the insect's compound eye, while considerably reducing both production costs and development time. Indeed, while the rotating version of the compass costs around €500, a fixed version with 2 × 374 polarization units could...