Autonomous vehicles already use a variety of sensors to navigate in traffic. However, these are not yet sufficient to prevent accidents 100 percent, as recent incidents clarified. Therefore researchers want to implement new sonsors in the vehicles on the model of grasshoppers. Grasshoppers are able to prevent collisions even in large, dense swarms. Their targeted compound eyes and special neurons filter out critical situations and forward them directly to the motion control. Thus, they can react quickly enough to a scenario.
A sensor that will also do this will be developed in the EU project Ultracept under the guidance of Shigang Yue. The goal is to get to the reaction rates of grasshoppers of 20ms. At the end of last year, a successful accident prevention test was carried out with a Quadrocopter.
