EE Seminar: Dynamic beamforming and steering in echolocating bats
Speaker: Amir Zviran
M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Anthony J. Weiss and Dr. Yossi Yovel
Wednesday, December 14th, 2016 at 15:30
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering
Dynamic beamforming and steering in echolocating bats
Abstract
Echoloating bats emit ultrasonic pulses and anlyze the received echoes to perceive their environment. The spatial distribution of the pulse's energy, also known as beamforming, determines the bat's biosonar field of view. By shifting its acoustic gaze and narrowing its beam, the bat may focus its attention on an object of interest.
In this work we tested the beam forming and steering of the mouth-emitting Pipistrellus kuhlii bat as it was searching and approaching its target. Using audio recordings from a microphone array and data collected from our state-of-the-art IR tracking system, we reconstructed the bat's beam shape and direction and made several interesting conclusions about its dynamic beamforming and steering behavior.
In addition, we compared our results with those anticipated by "the piston model", the most commonly used model for approximating the beam's shape of mouth-emitting bats.
