A Situated and Embodied Model of Ant Route Navigation

Abstract

This abstract summarises a model of route navigation inspired by the behaviour of ants presented fully in Baddeley et al. (2012). The ant‟s embodiment coupled with an innate scanning behaviour means that robust route navigation can be achieved by a parsimonious biologically plausible algorithm. The ability of social insects to learn long foraging routes guided by visual information (Wehner, 2009) shows that robust spatial behaviour can be produced with limited neural resources (Chittka and Skorupski, 2011). As such, social insects have become an important model system for understanding the minimal cognitive requirements for navigation and, more generally those studying animal cognition using a bottom-up approach to the understanding of natural intelligence (Wehner, 2009, Shettleworth, 2010) while also providing inspiration for biomimetic engineers. Models of visual navigation that have been successful in replicating place homing are dominated by snapshot-type models where a single view of the world as memorized from the goal location is compared to the current view in order to drive a search for the goal (Cartwright and Collet, 1983; for review, see Moller and Vardy, 2006). Snapshot approaches only allow for navigation in the immediate vicinity of the goal however, and do not achieve robust route navigation over longer distances (Smith et al., 2007). Here we present an embodied parsimonious model of visually guided route learning that addresses these issues (Baddeley et al., 2012). By utilising the interaction of sensori-motor constraints and observed innate behaviours we show that it is possible to produce robust behaviour using a learnt holistic representation of a route. Furthermore, we show that the model captures the known properties of route navigation in desert ants.