New Research Reveals How Ants Navigate: May Inspire Robotic Navigation In The Future

According to a study by an international team of researchers, including those from the University of Edinburgh and the Research Centre on Animal Cognition in Paris, ants are excellent navigators that keep a straight path, plot the sun's position in the sky and memorize their surroundings to guide their movements, so they can always find out which way they came from.

It has been further revealed that, incredibly, these little creatures get their bearings right irrespective of the body's orientation, and can find their way home under any condition!

Despite their tiny size, ants are sophisticated navigators that can find their way even while walking backwards, and these skills could help inspire better robots, scientists say.
[Photo Source]

Looking at ants you will notice they have tiny brains, but the study has found that ants use several faculties of the brain simultaneously, indicating that the brain of insects is more complex than previously thought.

But if we look at the size of the brain as a percentage of our body size, we find that ants can claim bigger brains as they account for about 15 percent of the creature's total mass while that of human brains are a meager 2 percent compared to the body size.

But this study was not to determine if ants are more intelligent than humans, but a study to discover the means of navigation of these hardy workers. And as Antoine Wystrach of the University of Edinburgh said,

Our main finding is that ants can decouple their direction of travel from their body orientation, they can maintain a direction of travel, let's say north, independently of their current body orientation.

Ants have a relatively tiny brain, less than the size of a pinhead. Yet they can navigate successfully under many difficult conditions, including going backward. [Photo Source]

But for robotics this would be useful as the surprisingly flexible and robust navigational behavior displayed by ants could inspire the development of novel computer algorithms and its step-by-step sets of operations, to help robots navigate in the future.

In this regard another researcher, Barbara Webb from the University of Edinburgh also said,

Understanding their behaviour gives us new insights into brain function, and has inspired us to build robot systems that mimic their functions

This would just be another example of science learning from nature!

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