Robot mimics desert ants to find its way home without GPS

A six-legged robot can find its way home without the help of GPS, thanks to tactics borrowed from desert ants. The robot, called AntBot, uses light from the sky to judge the direction its going. To assess the distance travelled it uses a combination of observing the motion of objects on the ground as they pass by and counting steps. All three of these techniques are used by desert ants. To test AntBot, Stéphane Viollet at the Aix-Marseille University in France and colleagues set an outdoor homing task: first go to several checkpoints, then return home.