Insect brains have been reverse-engineered to derive new algorithms for collision avoidance and navigation that can be used in robotics. "Opteran has been working with honeybee brains as they are both sufficiently simple and capable of orchestrating complex behavior. Honeybees are able to navigate over distances of 7 miles, and communicate their mental maps accurately to other bees. It does all this with fewer than a million neurons, in an energy-efficient brain the size of a pinhead."

"Opteran has successfully reverse-engineered the algorithm honeybees use for optical flow estimation (the apparent motion of objects in a scene caused by relative motion of the observer)."

Would be interesting to know what is the difference between honeybee neurons and the artificial neural networks used for deep learning.

Reverse-engineering insect brains to make robots

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