Efficient robot navigation inspired by honeybee learning flights (opens in new tab)

Navigation is a crucial capability for both animals and robots. Although tiny flying insects can robustly navigate over long distances1, state-of-the-art robot navigation methods are computationally expensive and therefore restricted to large robots2,3. Here we propose ‘Bee-Nav’, a highly efficient navigation strategy inspired by the visual learning flights of honeybees4–6. In equivalent robotic learning flights, a tiny neural network is trained to map omnidirectional images to a home vector ...