Abstract
Some animals have special sensing functions in order to find foods, home and mates. Instead of passively sensing, they discharge signals and then extract necessary information from the response. More importantly, they utilize the gradients of the sensed signal in order to find the destination or objects. In this paper this special strategy is formulated mathematically, i.e., the perturbation and the correlation based gradient estimation is developed. A stereo sensor system using temperature sensors mounted on motors is developed for verification. The proposed method can estimate the gradient of the measured value accurately. Using this method, the direction in the maximum measured value can be estimated accurately, and the position of the heat source can be estimated from the intersection of the directions estimated from both sensors.