Insect Strategies of Visual Homing in Mobile Robots

Abstract

. Insects, such as desert ants, employ visual homing strategies for returning to important places in their environment. A model that reproduces aspects of the insects' navigation behavior is the "snapshot model". It is based on the assumption that insects store a visual snapshot of the surroundings at the target location, and derive a home direction from a comparison of the current image with this snapshot. In this study, the snapshot model was adapted for robot navigation, extended with image processing routines, and tested on the mobile robot Sahabot 2. The precision of the visual homing achieved in the robot experiments is comparable to that of desert ants. On one hand, the experimental results confirm that the snapshot model is an appropriate model of insect navigation even under real-world conditions. On the other hand, they demonstrate that the parsimonious navigation strategies used by insects might be used as a guideline for the design of algorithms for robot navigation. 1 Intr...