An ant’s eye view of the world at the Royal Society science festival

Ants marked for study feed on their target destination - a dish of sugar solution

That’s the challenge being set by scientists from the University of Sussex, who will be presenting their research into how insects find their way home at the prestigious Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, which opens today (25 June 2010).

Researchers Dr Andrew Philippides (Informatics) and Dr Paul Graham (Life Sciences) from the University’s Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics (CCNR) will be explaining to visitors at the London exhibition the surprisingly complex mechanisms used by small-brained nest-dwelling insects as they navigate back home from foraging expeditions.

Dr Philippides says: "When insects go foraging, they zoom off from their nest in complex zig-zag paths. How do they manage to find their way back home? And how do they manage to do so along a straight path?"

To explore these questions, the team will be inviting visitors to try the "Ant Challenge" to discover if a human, with a brain 100,000 times bigger than an ant’s, can find a target location using ant-like navigational strategies and vision (reproduced by viewing the world through specially designed mirrors).

Dr Philippides says: "Ants are amazing navigators. We and many other people study them as their remarkable behaviour gives scientists insights into the cognitive building blocks of intelligence, and inspires the design of artificial brains for autonomous robots."

The team at Sussex use robotic modelling and behavioural experiments to investigate insect navigation. One current question is how ants encode a visual scene with low-resolution vision. For instance, it was recently found that ants can recognise a place using only a crude skyline.