Insects, in general, and honeybees, in particular, perform remarkably well at seeing and perceiving the world and navigating effectively in it, despite possessing a brain that weighs less than a milligram and carries fewer than 0.01% as many neurons as ours does. Working together with our colleagues, we have been trying to unravel the secrets of their success. Although most insects lack stereo vision, they use a number of ingenious strategies for perceiving their world in three dimensions and navigating successfully in it. For example, distances to objects are gauged in terms of the apparent speeds of motion of the objects' images, rather than by using complex stereo mechanisms. Foraging bees gauge distance flown by integrating optic flow: they possess a visually-driven "odometer" that is robust to variations in wind, body weight, energy expenditure, and the properties of the visual environment. Recent research on honeybee perception and cognition is beginning to reveal that these insects may not be the simple, reflexive creatures that they were once assumed to be. Bees exhibit “top-down” processing: that is, they are capable of using prior knowledge to detect poorly visible or camouflaged objects.

Finally, some of the above principles – especially those that relate vision and navigation – are offering novel, computationally elegant solutions to persistent problems in machine vision and robot navigation. Thus, we have been using some of the insect-based strategies described above to design, implement and test biologically-inspired algorithms for the guidance of autonomous terrestrial and aerial vehicles.