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.

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.