Design Of Bionic Polarization Navigation Sensor

With the development of the science and technology, navigation technique is widely used in various fields.Meanwhile, navigation sensors need to be with high precision, simple structure and low cost etc.In this paper, a novel navigation sensor is developed, which can provide both directing information from the polarized skylight and locating information from the Global Positioning Systems (GPS).The scientists found that some insects such us desert ants and bees are able to navigate by the polarized skylight, and they explained the navigation mechanism of these insects'eyes.Base on the former polarized light detecting model, we designed a sensor to process the polarized skylight.Then, we used wavelet denoising to reduce noise and compensate the inherent errors of the sensor through the Least Square Algorithm and Least Squares Support Vector Machines. The outdoor tests results indicated that the sensor is reliable and with no error accumulation, and can be further used in navigation system.The following points will be described in this paper,Firstly, the work mechanism of the senor is introduced by analyzing the polarization sensitivity structure of the desert ant and the polarization pattern of the skylight. Then the new improved way of processing the polarized light information is explained through some pictures and expressions.Secondly, the system of the sensor is introduced, including the executing process of the system program and the framework of the circuit. There are mainly five units in the system, including power managing unit, polarized skylight collecting and AD changing unit, GPS signal collecting and changing unit, system control and calculating unit, data transfer unit. Power managing unit and GPS signal collecting and changing unit are introduced in detail.Thirdly, we used an optic integrating sphere and a precise rotating table to measure the errors of the sensor. Then, the processes of wavelet denoising and error compensation are presented.Finally, the rules of the sensor error under different polarized degree skylight and the outdoor test result of the sensor are presented.