Performance of Two Homing Strategies in Environments with Differently Distributed Obstacles

Two computationally simple forms of dead reckoning were implemented in a physical robot (Khepera). The precision of homing was compared between both strategies for various environments in which obstacles were distributed in four different ways: regular, at random, clumped, and with walls. Counter intuitively, the computational more complex strategy did not perform better in general. Both strategies performed best in a regular environment. In a regular environment the simpler strategy (‘counter turning’) was even more precise than the more complex strategy (‘retrace your trail’). On the other hand, Retrace-Your-Trail performed better than Counter-turning in the clumped environment.