Insects have long been recognized for their ability to navigate and return home using visual cues from their nest’s environment. However, the precise mechanism underlying this remarkable homing skill remains a subject of ongoing investigation. Drawing inspiration from the learning flights of honey bees and wasps, we propose a robot navigation method based on directly learning the home vector directions from visual percepts during the learning flight. Subsequently, the robot will travel away from the nest, come back by odometric means, and eliminate the resultant drift by inferring the home vector orientation from the currently experienced view. In this study, a convolutional neural network is employed as learning mechanism in both simulated and real forest environments. Additionally, a comprehensive performance analysis reveals that the network’s homing abilities closely resemble those observed in real insects, all while only utilizing visual and odometric senses. If all images contain sufficient texture and illumination, the average errors
of the inferred home vectors remain below 24°. Moreover, our investigation reveals a noteworthy insight: the trajectory followed during the initial learning flight, for sample image acquisition, exerts a pronounced impact on the network’s output. For instance, a higher density of sample points in proximity to the nest results in a more consistent return. ... Read more