The navigational strategies employed by insects enable them to walk or fly over long distances, find food and return to their nest. To accomplish this they utilise a toolkit of elegant sensory and 'cognitive' strategies. In the Insect Navigation Group, we study these strategies using traditional behavioural experiments as well computational and robotic models.
News from the Sussex Insect Navigation Group
March '12: We are pleased to welcome Amandine Auréjac to the Sussex Insect Navigation Group. Amandine joins us from Toulouse as an RA for 4 months. She will mainly be working with Antoine and the learning walks of Melophorus.
Jan '12: We are really excited about the publication of Bart's latest bit of modelling. Which is now out in PLoS Comp Biol. We have playing with this idea of route navigation without waypoints and we think the paper is a lovely proof of concept that familiarity based navigation can underpin a really parsimonious algorithm. The pdf can be downloaded here.
Dec '11: Dr Antoine Wystrach joins us following a joint PhD between Toulouse and MacQuarie Universities. Antoine joins as a Fyssen Fellow.
Oct '11: Alex Dewar has started a DPhil in the group, Alex joins us following a MSc in Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience from Sheffield.
Sept '11: Andy and Paul's pop science article: "How smart is an ant?" from Catalyst: Secondary Science Review (Vol 21, Issue 4, pages 19-21) is now available online.
July '11: Great to see the publication of another paper from Lena's Thesis. This work, concerning learning of sequences by wood ants, has just been published in J Exp Biol. Riabinina, de Ibarra, Howard and Collett Do wood ants learn sequences of visual stimuli? (2011) JEB, 214, 2739-2748. Comments on this article can be found on the community BLOG http://insectandrobotnavigation.wordpress.com
