Desert ants are such exemplary navigators that research has stipulated; they use the Earth's magnetic fields for orientation. One thing is for sure, ants always find their way home. Now, researchers took inspiration from these tiny insects to design a robot that can move independently and then find its way back to its base without any GPS or mapping. They have appropriately named it the AntBot. "It is equipped with an optical compass used to determine its heading by means of polarized light, and by an optical movement sensor directed to the sun to measure the distance covered. Armed with this information, AntBot has been shown to be able, like the desert ants, to explore its environment and to return on its own to its base, with the precision of up to 1 cm after having covered a total distance of 14 meters," says the organization's press release.

When designing robots, researchers have long turned to the natural world for inspiration, from robots that can leap and bound like dogs to aquatic robots that can swim like squids. And by turning their attention to the tiny picnic crashers on the ground, a team of French researchers may have stumbled on a discovery that could alter the landscape of exploratory robotics. Engineers from the French National Center for Scientific Research and the Institute of Movement Sciences announced today that they've successfully built a robot that autonomously navigates without GPS. Not with magic, but with properties gleaned from a certain unwelcome picnic guest. Their findings were published in the journal Science Robotics.

Insects in general are unfailingly impressive with how intelligent and capable they are, with an absolute minimum of sensing and computing power. Where things start to get really interesting is when insects have to get clever in order to manage particularly challenging environments. Desert ants are a great example of this: While most ants rely on pheromone trails to navigate (they retrace their smell trails to get back to the nest), the heat of the desert means that pheromones don't last very long. Instead, desert ants rely on a variety of techniques, including step counting, optic flow, landmarks, and most notably solar navigation. These techniques seem like they could come in handy for small, inexpensive robots exploring out in the solar system, where GPS isn't available and sophisticated sensors come with a mass and power budget to match.

In case you've been envying the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis lately, don't. Skittering around the Sahara, the insect endures temperatures so brutal, it can sometimes only manage foraging runs of 15 minutes before it burns to death. Making matters worse, the heat obliterates the pheromone chemical trails that ants typically lay for each other to navigate. Get lost out here, and you're literally cooked. Accordingly, desert ants have evolved superpowers.

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. AntBot consitently completed the task and was only a few centimetres off its home target on average.

These tiny machines just proved size doesn't matter. A team of six robots weighing a total of 3.5 ounces, demonstrated they have enough pulling power to move a 3,900 pound car and driver at 20x speed Inspired by ants, the'microTugs' synchronize their movements and harness coordination to pull over 2,000 times their own body weight. A team of six robots weighing a total of 3.5 ounces, just proved to have enough pulling power to move a 3,900 pound car. Inspired by ants, the'microTug' robots synchronize their movements and harness coordination to pull over 2,000 times their own body weight Some microrobots move forward in quick jolts, so they do not overlap nor work well together. Twenty robots only apply two times the forces of a single robot.