Navigating on Mars — or anywhere — is hard. Before you work out where to go, you need to work out where you are. You need to avoid insurmountable obstacles but not be put off by surmountable ones. You need to plot the most efficient route.
For a robot to do it independently, it takes high-definition cameras, lidar (light detection and ranging) and a lot of processing power.
And if an insect was given the same task? All it needs is a brain the size of a pinhead containing one eighty-thousandth the processing power of our own.
This was the insight that led a British company to build software that thinks like an insect — software that, this week, it was announced, was being
Content retrieved from: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/how-ants-and-honeybees-could-help-robots-navigate-on-mars-l8sckv0k6.
