5. Our celestial compass

5.1 Why a new design?

The minimalist, bio-inspired celestial compass prototypes presented above clearly demonstrate interesting performance for autonomous navigation purposes. However, this work needs to be qualified. On the one hand, the experimental conditions are systematically favorable (controlled environment or optimal weather conditions), and on the other hand, solutions using CCD cameras have certainly given good results, but the size and cost of processing visual information represent a strong limitation for possible deployment in mobile robotics.

The challenge is to design a celestial compass that requires few pixels and computing resources, is small in size, and whose configuration and operation are as close as possible to the sensory modalities of...