School of Mathematics Computer Science and Engineering, City University of London, London, EC1V 0HB, UK.
Sci Rep. 2022 Jul 11;12(1):11764. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-15904-1.
Previous behavioural research on live sea lions has shown that they are able to detect the direction of oncoming vortices, even when impacting contralaterally. These experiments showed that the whisker system and the animal's neural processing is seemingly able to detect the Direction of Arrival (DoA) from just one side of the heads vibrissal pads. Therefore, temporal differences between whisker stimulation is a likely method for determining the angle. Herein, a theoretical model is presented based on multilateration, and tested by experimental studies on a 2D array of bio-inspired whiskers with regular spacing, and a 3D array of bio-inspired whiskers on a model head of a sea lion, as used in our previous studies. The results show that arrays of whiskers can in principle work as antennae to determine the DoA. This detection of the DoA is achieved by cross-correlation of triplets of whiskers, and Time Difference Of Arrival based multilateration, a method similar to signal processing in modern communication systems and other source localization applications. The results on the 2D array are conclusive and clearly support the hypothesis, while increased uncertainties were found for the 3D array, which could be explained by structural shortcomings of the experimental model. Possible ways to improve the signal are discussed.
先前关于活体海狮的行为研究表明，即使是在对侧受到冲击的情况下，它们也能够检测到来袭的涡流的方向。这些实验表明，触须系统和动物的神经处理似乎能够仅通过头部触须垫的一侧检测到到达方向（DoA）。因此，触须刺激之间的时间差异可能是确定角度的一种方法。本文提出了一种基于多边测量法的理论模型，并通过对具有规则间距的二维仿生触须阵列和我们之前研究中使用的海狮模型头部的三维仿生触须阵列的实验研究进行了测试。结果表明，触须阵列原则上可以作为天线来确定 DoA。这种 DoA 的检测是通过三对触须的互相关和基于到达时间差的多边测量来实现的，这是一种类似于现代通信系统和其他声源定位应用中的信号处理方法。二维阵列的结果是结论性的，明确支持了这一假设，而对于三维阵列，则发现了更大的不确定性，这可以通过实验模型的结构缺陷来解释。讨论了提高信号的可能方法。
