Our goal was to simulate whale echolocation. Select whale species send out a series of clicks and intepret their echoes after bouncing back from surrounding objects. Our project does just that!
In our setup, there are two whales, one represented by a stationary Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller and one mobile robot also programmed with a Raspberry Pi Pico. Both whales are equipped with a microphone and a speaker. When the moving whale emits clicks, the stationary whale detects the sounds and reponds with its own clicks of another frequency. The mobile whale can use the calculated time from when a click is sent to when a response is received to determine the distance to the stationary whale and decides which direction to move in, based on our implementation of a state machine to navigate in a grid-like manner towards the stationary whale.