Mathematical Investigation for the Adaptive Acoustic Navigation of the Bats during Spatial Learning Flight

Abstract

Echolocating bats actively adjust the characteristics of their emitted ultrasound pulse during acoustic navigation. In this study, changes in the pulse direction and flight path of bats during an obstacle-avoiding flight were experimentally investigated as the bats became familiar with the space. Moreover, we also investigated the psychological effect on behavioral differences between the unfamiliar space and familiar space navigation by using proposed model following the measured behavior of bats. As a result of behavioral measurements, as the bats became familiar with the space, they increase the flight speed at the same time of reducing the useless flight curvature. Moreover, despite of frequently shifting the pulse direction during unfamiliar space flight, bats also changed its control to be smoothly shifted toward ahead of flight direction. Our numerical simulation suggests that such behavioral differences could be simply represented by describing the “alert attention” to the every obstacle into the mathematical model.