Insects’ precision will help artificial systems to navigate

For millions of years, animals that navigate have developed biological solutions to compensate for noise in their inbuilt compasses. As a Wallenberg Scholar, Marie Dacke wants to reveal these successful solutions and contribute new approaches to technical innovations within robotics and artificial intelligence. 

Birds, crustaceans, turtles and insects use the sun to calibrate their biological compasses, which helps them to travel a steady course. Many non-flying insects, however, cannot fix the sun on their retina while navigating. This is because their heads, and therefore their eyes, move in all directions along with their bodies’ natural movements, not least on uneven surfaces.

“In theory, this ought to give very noisy sensory readings of the position of the sun and other directional markers. Yet the insects still navigate with impressive precision”, says Marie Dacke.

Being unable to stabilise the field of vision is a challenge not only for biological systems, it also creates problems in the area of robotics, where various mobile units often need to handle noisy input data and unpredictable body positions. In this regard, dung beetles are an excellent object of study when it comes to how it is possible to process noisy and varying directional information.

Unique measurements

Dacke and her research group therefore wish to chart dung beetles’ ability to take robust decisions based on imprecise information. The dung beetles’ relatively large bodies, combined with extremely reliable orientational behaviour, make them ideal for behavioural studies, neurophysiological experiments or carrying small electronic components on their backs.

In order to understand how visual impressions are processed by the dung beetle, researchers will develop a unique combination of biomechanical measurements, behavioural analyses and electrophysiology. The questions that will be asked are: Does the dung beetle’s compass ignore any kind of noise? Might it even make use of some element of the noise in order to overcome it? How does an insect determine how trustworthy an information source is?