And fourth, they lack the robustness required in the real world. This idea is very appealing, since it eliminates the problem of dealing with movement uncertainty in mobile agents. The new approach regards homing as the basic navigation ability. The main problem now, is in finding robust, reliable and simple strategies that will enable the agent to navigate between important locations in the environment. A very promising direction for solving this problem is in looking at the navigation strategies employed by biological agents.
Biological agents are impressive navigators.
Especially ants and bees are able to carry out incredible navigational tasks, despite their tiny bodies and their limited computational and memory resources. A desert ant, for example, can return home unfailingly after searching for food in places hundreds of meters away, and a honeybee can home reliably after flying to a food source located several kilometers away. A number of experiments performed with insects have unraveled important properties of the navigation strategies that they use. It is known, for example, that ants and bees use skylight patterns as a compass to determine the direction in which they travel. By continously monitoring compass and distance information, an insect searching for food is able to keep track of the distance and direction to its nest.