Honeybees inspire a super-efficient navigation system for drones
Honeybees routinely travel up to 2 miles (3 km) from their hive in search of food before returning home, with remarkable accuracy. Relative to body size, this is comparable to a human traveling hundreds of miles and finding their way back without a map, compass, GPS, or smartphone. Despite possessing brains smaller than a sesame seed, bees accomplish this feat with astonishing efficiency. Now, researchers have adapted those same biological principles into a drone navigation system that can guide lightweight flying robots home using just 42 KB of memory.
Developed by a team led by Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, the system, dubbed Bee-Nav, enables drones to autonomously navigate and return to their starting point without GPS or computationally intensive mapping systems. The researchers demonstrated the technology in both indoor and outdoor environments, including a flight covering more than 600 m (1,970 ft), while using neural networks thousands...
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