Designing and experimenting bio-inspired chromatic behaviours in surveillance robot

Numerous work has been done in biologically inspired robotics emulating models, systems and elements of nature for the purpose of solving traditional robotics problems. Chromatic behaviours are abundant in nature across a variety of living species to achieve camouflage, signaling, and temperature regulation. The ability of these creatures to successfully blend in with their environment by changing their colour is the fundamental inspiration for our research work. In this paper, we present a dwarf chameleon inspired chromatic behaviour in the context of an autonomous surveillance robot, Pachondhi. In our experiments, we successfully validated the ability of the robot to autonomously change its colour in relation to the terrain that it is traversing for both maximizing detectability to conspecifics as well as minimizing exposure to predators.