Combining Active and Passive Acoustic Sensing in Teams of Mobile Robots

Evidence suggests that bats are able to take advantage of both their own echolocation signals (active sensing) and the signals of conspecifics in their environment (passive sensing). This work follows a bioinspired approach to investigate whether we can enable robots to do the same. We have simulated a pair of vehicles that acoustically sense their environment both actively and passively. Our results show that, while the ability to fuse acoustic sensing techniques may not provide a significant improvement over active sensing alone, it is rarely worse and often allows for more information about the environment to be observed.