Albert Cardona on Nostr: "Efficient robot navigation inspired by honeybee learning flights", Ou et al. 2026 " ...

"Efficient robot navigation inspired by honeybee learning flights", Ou et al. 2026 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10461-3

" ‘Bee-Nav’, a highly efficient navigation strategy inspired by the visual learning flights of honeybees. In equivalent robotic learning flights, a tiny neural network is trained to map omnidirectional images to a home vector based on path integration. After learning, the robot can fly far away from home, come straight back using path integration and cancel integration drift using the visual homing network"

"In real-world indoor and outdoor experiments, a small drone successfully returned to within 0.5 m of home for 100% of 30–110-m flights and 70% of 200–600-m flights in windy conditions, using 3.4-kB and 42-kB neural networks, respectively."

Honeybees still do better, but hey, it's a good start. Now imagine we had the whole honeybee #connectome mapped.

#neuroscience #robotics #honeybees #drones