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
May '13: Following the success of the success of Bart's modelling project, Antoine has led a project to model famous ant navigation experiments. The purpose is to demonstrate that simper explanations (than those traditionally used) can account for the data. The article is in JEB and can be downloaded from the Publications section.
April '13: Tom, David and Paul's most recent paper is out this month. The article is in Current Biology and concerns the ways that ants encode panoramic scenes for navigation. The article can be downloaded from the Publications section.
March '13: So ... you wait ages for a learning flight paper and then two come along at once. Tom and Andy have a pair of new learning flight papers published in J Exp Biol this month. The articles can be downloaded from our Publications section.
Jan '13: January has been a busy month for new arrivals. Doug Gaffin has arrived from Oklahoma to work with Andy and Paul on familiarity ideas. Doug is on sabbatical and will be here for a few months. Lise Diez meanwhile is a longer term arrival. Lise has arrived on a Royal Society Newton award to work with Paul. They'll be looking at interactions between visual cue learning and pheromone trail use in L. niger.
Nov '12: Paul recently gave a presntation at a UCL workshop on Navigation in Terrestrial Species. The video of of Paul's presentation, entitled 'Navigation with a small brain', can be viewed online.
Sept '12: Antoine and Paul have a new Commentary article published in i-perception. The article "View-based matching can be more than image matching: The importance of considering an animal's perspective" can be downloaded from here.