European Commission : CORDIS : News and Events : How maggots are influencing the future of robotics

What can software designers and ICT specialists learn from maggots? Quite a lot, it would appear. Through understanding how complex learning processes in simple organisms work, EU-funded scientists hope to usher in an era of self-learning robots and predictive computing. Even with limited brain power, an organism can choose the right thing to do in response to external stimuli, which is something that current computational learning theory cannot fully account for. Learning from maggots The EU-funded MINIMAL project, launched in 2014, has focused on the learning processes in a relatively simple animal, the fruit fly larva (maggots).