Visual homing in insects and robots

Insects use memorised visual representations to find their way back to places of interest, like food sources and nests. They acquire these visual memories during systematic learning flights or walks on their first departure and update them whenever approaches to the goal have been difficult. The fact that small insects are so good at localisation tasks with apparent ease has attracted the attention of engineers interested in developing and testing methods for visual navigation on mobile robots. We briefly review here (1) homing in insects; (2) what is known about the content of insect visual memories; (3) recent robotics advances in view-based homing; (4) conditions for view-based homing in natural environments and (5) issues concerning the acquisition of visual representations for homing.