A survey of desert ant navigation

Abstract

Desert ant (Cataglyphis) is famous for its ability in navigation. In a desert with very few visual and odor information, the ant can return it's den almost along a straight line after foraging away in a distance of much more than thousands of times of it's body length. Two main mechanisms compose Cataglyphis's navigational toolbox: path integration and visual navigation. Path integration is achieved by using sky light compass based on polarized light and odometer, while visual navigation relies on landmark based memory and matching. In this paper, a survey of research work on desert ant navigation is presented, as well as the application of these navigation mechanism of desert ant to robots' navigation, especially bionic robots cruising in strange environment.